It is rare that any human being gets the kind of chance given to today’s youth in Mongolia. This giant country has a tiny population, and yet its people are entrepreneurial, hardy, and open. And the economy will thrive based on strong economic conditions, robust civil society, freedom of the press, and great education.

No cash? No knowledge. And we're not even sorry. Ah, the old days.

Today’s youth have advantages that people my age (I am a young 40) never had. When I was ten, I used the Encyclopedia Britannica as a reference work at home. Parents would buy the set of books in installments (A-B, C-D, etc). If your parents did not have enough money, you would not get all the books. Can you imagine not having access to any word starting with the letter ‘M’?

Of course not.

Now, at the click of a button, or the swipe of a finger on a smart phone, you can get access to information, tips, insights, connections in a way that was considered witchcraft just a few decades ago. This means that today’s youth have an information edge.

You also have a permission edge. When I was at school, the teacher directed our learning plan. We were told what to do. Now, as a creatively disruptive child, I only mostly followed. You, on the other hand, have the ability and freedom to connect to whoever you want to, to ask whatever question you want, without having to ask permission. It is up to you now whether you use it or not as an individual, and how you use this power.

Even if you decide not to use your powers, you will still benefit personally from these changes in the world. This is because of your group edge. All human beings are social creatures. The youth of today have grown up dramatically more social than any previous generation in mankind. This is because it is so easy to connect with others, to share, and to help. I used to make model airplanes (don’t laugh). My frame of reference was only the model shop in the high street. If I were still building model planes today (which I am not), I would have a wealth of community knowledge, experience, and support to get more engaged in my area.

Less memory than your credit card - stored on something called a 'cassette'

Things have also gotten easier, even though you would never believe it (and rightly so). It used to be almost impossible to do anything in the past. I used my first computer when I was seven (using cassettes to store data). I used my first mobile phone at 22 years old (1982). Can you imagine doing anything without either device – and that is pre-Internet. It turns out that you have the easy edge in that many things, like creating companies, doing advertising, finding talent, solving problems have become much easier, faster, and cheaper with today’s technology and global experience sharing. This will sound incredible to you that it is easy, and to a large extent this edge is fleeting as the edge can be exploited by anyone with the right mindset, whatever the age.

I did some work early in 2011 on whether Berlusconi would leave office. I even worked up a plan in the Spring on a ‘sex strike’ in Italy. This concept was based on accelerating his leaving office with a mass movement, tied to Berlusconi’s veracious sexual appetite (perhaps for 17 year-old Moroccan girls, the court will find out).

The concept of the sex strike goes back to ancient Greece and Aristophanes’ play Lysistrata, in which, according to Wikipedia, “Lysistrata persuades the women of Greece to withhold sexual privileges from their husbands and lovers as a means of forcing the men to negotiate peace….”

In the end I decided that there was no need for any activity. Mostly this was because I had no one to work with on the ground who could do something about the plan, and wanted to execute a plan. Partly because no one thought that a women’s sex strike in Italy had a chance of working anyway. But the key reason for me was that there was a sense of inevitability. Berlusconi was going to go anyway.

As I write this today (8 Nov), it looks like his coalition is crumbling around him. His biggest concern, I am sure, is not about losing the post of Prime Minister. It will ONLY be losing immunity. So, you can expect him to fight as much as he can to maintain his post, whatever the cost is to Italy’s reputation. I’d expect him to try to negotiate a deal, like Saleh leaving Yemen. Unfortunately for Berlusconi, he’s operating in a fractious, but functioning parliamentary democracy. So, he’s gone.

It will be as seismic as the fall of Mubarak or Ben-Ali. A decade of Berlusconi gone in a two weeks.

We live in interesting times. I need to polish my crystal ball once again (scratch that – my trajectory methodology – no hockus-pocus here!). Netanyahu’s coalition government will collapse too, sometime between Dec and Spring 2012. Why? Ah, that’s for another post (I have a plane to catch).

"Senior Analyst at Big Consulting Company Prepares Risk Assessment Report"

I have been working on a plan to help change the world (for better) at huge scale. Ultimately this means:

• helping people be more happy…
• and less sad…
• be free to choose…
• and address world ills through dramatic advances in technology (in its broadest sense – think electricity and lightbulbs, not Facebook or Wikipedia)

I was fortunate enough to do a pilot of my techniques in 2008, with the pilot methods being used to usher in a Transition Government in Zimbabwe (story here). Once I found out for real that the plans had worked (it took about 6 months for me to learn what had actually happened), I then spent about a year working on my methods and techniques. I also hid away my techniques for fear that they could be used for nastiness.

I did realize that nasty people were already using these tactics. After all, I study bad people to learn how they operate, and so a portion of my ideas-base for these techniques comes from historical insight into what bad people have done. In addition, I realized that most complex systems end up with positive outcomes. Systems do not like anarchy, and all it takes is a reasonable number of people to want to be largely good for the outcomes to be actually good.

My goal is to help others. I do not know who needs help. So I have been going around the last couple of years offering to help people who want to do good in the world, especially scaling and spreading good things.

Unfortunately there is an inherent skepticism people have when they hear someone offering to help. In addition, most people, particularly those who have gained a reputation for success in a certain area, are uncomfortable sharing their problems or challenges. So, this gave me a challenge: how can I break through people’s barriers to find out if I could be helpful?

I figured out a tactic, and it has worked pretty well, especially in 2011. My tactic was plausible ridiculousness. This tactic involved taking things that I have worked on for real, and framing them up as a story so that, whilst they are truthful, the stories sound almost impossible to believe. The Zimbabwe story is like that – it sounds ridiculous to think that you could work out a way of crowdsourcing election monitoring in just 45 minutes, while being slightly hung over. The story could be told differently, but I am working towards a more long-term goal.

If you're going to do it, don't use moccasins or comfortable slippers

I have used this tactic as a form of “sniff test”. I discovered that many people are highly skeptical of the story. Then there is a group who are dismissive [Note: I am not a violent person, but I would really like to stamp on the foot of the next person who say "well, it didn't really work, did it, Mutgabe's still there". Yes, he is still there, and yes, I got my math wrong. However - as I think hard about lifting up my foot for a covert stamp - at least someone DID SOMETHING that MOSTLY WORKED].

Some people do not listen at all. I could be handing over state secrets, and all they want to do is go back to their own conversation topics (usually in network meetings where an advisor is trying to pitch her or his services). Many though listen in rapt attention, amazed and inspired by the story.

And a few, an important few, ask quietly for help.

And that is when things get interesting.

Over time, my tactic will change. As the story gets told of the citizen activism in Libya, for example, then the story will cease being ‘ridiculous’ and become merely ‘incredible’. I will be a little sad when that happens, as I quite enjoy teasing people with impossible sounding stories. At the same time I know that I will already be moving on to my next ‘ridiculous project’, that of accelerating scientific discovery across a wide range of disciplines. I expect that when that starts happening, most people (especially scientists) will be thinking:

“OK, so the whole dictatorship thing is real, crazy but real. I get it. But this whole ‘change science thing’? There is no way that is going to work. No chance!”

And I’ll be happy again.

A photo taken of a local election result - nice and clear

My first ever big ‘change the world (for better)‘ initiative was helping the MDC opposition in Zimbabwe win the 2008 elections. I have told the story many times (in person, and sometimes with a glass of wine in hand). In order to provide more detail around the story, plus some photos of what actually happened, I put together a document that outlines what was done, why it was done, and what the outcome was. OK, the math was wrong in the end – if there had been 300 extra people with camera phones, the vote would have definitively been recorded and Mutgabe would have lost totally. Still, it was a first-of-a-kind project, an experiment, and it worked enough to usher in the Transitional Government that exists in Zimbabwe today.

This is the kind of extreme problem solving work I find myself doing at my marketing agency, Orcasci (www.orcasci.com). Short, ultra-high impact engagements. When they work (which they do most of the time) the benefit is huge – sometimes, as this case shows, country-changing. And when they don’t work… nothing happens (people just don’t implement the ideas, no disasters).

So, take a look – maybe you’ll be inspired to do a similar project with collective intelligence and the science of spread too. (click to open the PDF)

"We are 99 Percent"

Companies are a relatively recent invention. The modern company is viewed as emerging in the UK, with the Joint Stock Companies Act of 1844 and the Limited Liabilities Act of 1855. Key to this was the creation of a company as a separate legal person, a vehicle which housed the rights and duties of investors and managers.

As companies have grown in economic importance, we have seen a growing disconnect between the activities of the corporation, and the human needs that these entities are supposed to represent and serve. A company commits gross acts of negligence, such as the recent BP oil spill in the Gulf, and its punishment is a fine. A fine which is ultimately paid by the shareholders of the company, not the managers or executives in the company, the people who actually had the responsibility for the crime in the first place.

This lack of accountability is most stark in the financial industry. Lehman Brothers went bankrupt and caused a collapse of practically the entire financial system. And yet the executives and board directors who ran the corporation ended up keeping their past bonuses, gained from running the company as a pyramid scheme that finally crashed. The worst that happened to them was that they lost their jobs. Big deal.

Richard Fuld netted $500 million in compensation between 1993 and 2007. He sold his $13M house to his wife in Nov 2008 for $100 to protect his assets from law suits

In 2009, in the midst of the financial crisis, I started working on some ideas on how to prevent this type of meltdown in the financial system. I considered it to be a complex system, replete with many types of entities and interactions, vastly complex… and yet at the same time, fortunately not very complicated. A complicated problem is hard to fix. A complex problem is simple, providing that one understands the simple rules that guide the actors in a complex system.

What became apparent is that the financial system – and that of the corporate system – was run by entities called companies (and governments, but that is a side issue). These entities were owned by shareholders, an amorphous mass with basically no power or say in how their investments were actually run. The entities were controlled by boards of directors, a group of individuals with distinct legal obligations on behalf of the investors and the companies. And the entities were managed by executives, sometimes the same people who sat on the board.

These structures created an appearance of accountability. In reality there is no accountability whatsoever. No one asks directors to pay back their wages for three years of running a pyramid scheme (like the Lehman situation). No one seeks jail time for executives who make stupid decisions (like Northern Rock, RBS, Citigroup, Dexia, and, and, and).

Dexia Bank - consumed €6 Billion in EU taxpayers cash in 2008... all gone now

Now this would not be a problem as, in some people’s minds, these corporate disasters have been victimless crimes. Unfortunately they are not victimless. The people who have to pay for these mistakes, these crass errors of judgment, are the taxpayers, today’s and tomorrow’s. And the people who benefit from these mistakes? The very same people, often, who caused the mistakes in the first place.

So, my suggestion is to introduce the concept of personal accountability into business. This would mean creating a new type of criminal offence, a Corporate Responsibility crime, and that people who are judged in court to have broken the law will go to jail.

In the 1800s many countries had Debtors’ Prisons that incarcerated people if they had not paid their debts (See Wikipedia history). These offences were eliminated, and in 1976 the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights came into effect stating, “No one shall be imprisoned merely on the ground of inability to fulfill a contractual obligation.”

Today, of course, there is a 1-800 number to hire a service to manage your debts for you...

Today, I believe that the absence of meaningful personal repercussions for bad or poorly thought-through behavior has directly resulted in billions of dollars of wasted taxpayer money, many deaths in corporate accidents, and has perversely put billions of dollars back into the pockets of those who cause the problems in the first place.

Until there is a downside to the upside equation, this perverse set of behaviors will continue. Indeed, within just two years of the last financial meltdown and multi-billion dollar payout to banks and bankers around the world, we find our governments about to make the same deal with the same bankers. Taxpayers are paying twice to the same people for basically the same mistakes.

So, I believe a fairer deal is a new form of corporate social responsibility (CSR). Not the type where a company claims to support the environment, provides support to local arts companies, and takes blood from its staff (aka blood drives on site). A new type of CSR where the Directors and Senior Executive positions are eligible for this new type of Corporate Responsibility crime if their business fails in a material way while they were in a position of responsibility.

In this way the individuals who run a company have to think about the impact on themselves:

• Is an extra $1 million in bonuses worth the risk of going to jail for six months as you agreed to cut back on maintenance in a refinery?
• Is a 5% increase in the share price, triggering a fat options contract, worth two years of prison if it means leveraging the company to the hilt on debt?

Now of course there will be lots of issues in working out how such a crime can be crafted into law, and then put into action. It is hard to imagine such a law being introduced retrospectively, for instance. And the devil will certainly be hiding in the details, ably supported, as always, by the devil’s advocate. And yet it is not impossible to craft such a law. Laws have been created many times to handle new crimes that come into being, or new societal perspectives on things that used to be considered normal (husbands raping wives, adults having sex with minors, etc).

The current system of justice is totally unfair. Crimes that cost no real damage to property or to others can end up with jail sentences for months and years. After the UK riots a 23-year old college student with no criminal record was jailed for 6 months for stealing a £3.50 case of bottled water (see Telegraph story). Meanwhile the bankers responsible for the huge new borrowing of UK government to protect the banking system got off totally scott free. A spot of garden leave at home. And usually a nice fat pension for the rest of their lives.

So we need to inject personal accountability into corporations to balance out the corporate system. Corporations are a vehicle of human invention, the invention of governments and the law. They have not existed for ever, just 150 years of our existence. And even during this time they have morphed and responded to changes in the economic and social context.

I believe it is time to add accountability back in to the contract a company has with society, and that entails developing and enacting a new law, a criminal law. That should scare executives and directors enough to stop their excesses. Nothing else seems to.

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The Iraqi news, by contrast, was more utilitarian, more ra-ra pro-war, with very few human voices reaching the global media.

I think there are two main reasons for this:

1) Iraq was a US-led war, with US war reporting restrictions & conventions

&

2) Libya had a ton of journalists in town who all needed the human hook after six-months of civil war attrition

There is minimal control that one can exert on the press in Libya, unless, of course, you were a star international journalist (or conspiracy-theory stooge) and stuck in the Rixos Hotel listening to regime rhetoric and stage-managed events. This means that the flow of information is highly porous, especially so in the tense fin-de-regime moments.

In contrast, Iraq – and also Afghanistan – were full-on, international war zones. Hence the machinery of war reporting was vastly different.

Secondly I believe that the time it has taken to dismantle the cover of the Gaddafi regime has led journalists deeper into the story, looking to hook viewers into more of a human interest angle. And, once they got started, they are stuck in that pattern. Not that that is a bad thing – it is just different to ra-ra reporting.

Perhaps there is a final 3rd reason for the change in reporting style. The Iraq War was fought within Facebook and Twitter, without photos being uploaded from cameras to YouTube within moments of them occurring. Media was more controllable, all those many years ago (ok, a short decade).

So now we have citizens reporting news for other citizens around the world. And unfiltered news ‘push’ channels, like Twitter, than helps news seep out, bypassing the curated web sites of the New York Times and the BBC. Even smaller news sources have benefited somewhat as the use of Google News creeps up, allowing people to create their own customized daily news feed (mine contains “Libya”, “Syria”, “Belarus”, “North Korea”, and recently “Iran”).

News reporting on key events creates a very influential lens for people growing up while events unfold. By growing up, I mean the teenage and young adult years, the impressionable years. Perhaps we will get lucky therefore, and the generation coming of age will have a model of humanity and connection to people as a role for themselves to match.

The thing is, as a professional in the world of spread and contagion, the tactic used was based on a well-timed and targeted hoax, one that absolutely succeeded in its objective.

A hoax? A success? Let me explain.

1)    There was planning behind the uprising – the uprising of Tripoli did not happen by chance. Yes, it was an emergent phenomenon, something that was widely unexpected by the media, military and intelligence analysts alike. But that lack of expectation merely highlights that the nature of planning in complex, emergent environments is different to the linear thinking most people indulge in. Planning for an emergent uprising of the people encompasses communication plans, defections, and all kinds of psych ops type of activity, many of whose components will actually not work or not be implemented on the day, but still, with a bit of luck, the plan still manages to work.

1. Incidentally the Telegraph in the UK has written a story on one possible set of explanations for the uprising – have a look here.

2)    When a complex system is ‘rolling’, give it a push to ‘tip’ it – once a complex system has destabilized (the pattern of behavior has been stopped, and it is trying to find a new pattern), there is a lot of confusion. Most people in the system will latch on to any news that seems credible and indicates a direction of movement in line with the movement they are personally experiencing. So, a story that Saif and his brothers have been arrested ‘fits’ the narrative people are hearing and feeding themselves.

3)    Every system has a core structure – in this case, the real intended target for communication was the senior officers and critical army and security units. The goal for the uprising was to tip these people away from Gaddafi loyalism. The well-timed hoax – “not one, but three brothers arrested!” – meant that the free Libyan ‘forces’, rag-tag though they were, could have rapid, plausible conversations with these officers and army groups that the end had arrived. According to reports on Twitter, around 30 officers defected as a result of hearing about Saif’s arrest. Sure, they felt pretty sheepish the day after when Saif appears, high on adrenaline, in the middle of an armed convoy. But, it was too late to do anything about it.

So, just to re-iterate my view. In war, hoaxes are an acceptable part of the game. They can happen in a prepared way, or by accident along the way. A useful hoax is intended to address a core group who you want to target, with the goal of destabilizing the system structure you wish to replace. The hoax will be found out quite quickly but, if timed right, will have the intended impact. And those in the masses who learn about the story – and the subsequent story about the hoax – should not be too upset at being hoodwinked. It’s just part of the ‘game’ of war.

Why can’t people just get along… two incidents, both local people complaining about encroachment into their local lands (goat herding, etc) – Chinese workers end up killing two people – driving a truck into one, and a forklift truck into another. It will be interesting whether the news / internet clampdown can actually work.