Change Agents & Megacities

A friend of Government Change Agents named Pete Odell, COO of a company named Swan Island, tipped me off this week to a very innovative study just released by Siemens on the future of so called ‘mega-cities’.

Here is an excerpt from the introduction to the study that dramatically caught my attention:

“At some point in 2007, humanity will reach a significant demographic milestone: for the first time in history more people will live in cities than the countryside, according to predictions by the United Nations. By 2030, over 60% of people will live in cities. The growth rate is particularly rapid in many of the so-called megacities, cities with more than 10 million inhabitants. The megacities listed by the UN already have a total population of around 280 million. They are increasingly the growth engines of their respective national economies. But as these cities and economies grow, so do the challenges.”

To gather their results, Globescan and MRC McLean Hazel interviewed 500 executives from 25 cities across the world, including New York and Los Angeles. The high level findings are the following:

• Megacities prioritize economic competitiveness and employment
• The environment matters, but may be sacrificed for growth
• Transport overtakes all other infrastructure concerns
• Better governance is a vital step towards better cities
• Holistic solutions are desired, but are difficult to achieve
• Cities will seek to improve services, but could do more to manage demand
• Technology will help to deliver transparency and efficiency
• The private sector has a role to play in increasing efficiency

This study defines a challenge for future urban change agents. City officials across the globe must consider the massive infrastructure changes that will be necessary in order for cities to scale. With regard to the need for better governance, here is what the study concluded:

• Economic growth and employment are the primary drivers in decision-making for specialists in city management
• Environmental issues are also important but are sometimes sacrificed in the race for growth
• Attempts to deliver holistic solutions are often undermined by a lack of strategic planning and poor coordination between different levels of government
• Many cities focus on increasing supply to cope with growth; demand management strategies have yet to be widely adopted
• Infrastructure will usually remain under public control, but the private sector has an important role to play in managing services for increased efficiency

The lack of holistic solutions is what strikes me as most concerning from the above bulleted list. As with almost all problems facing government, they can only be solved thorough horizontal thinking and collaboration. This report is a wake up call, affirming that for change to take root in a megacity, change agents must be unleashed with great speed and over-authorization. If not, and change agents become stifled during the ongoing evolution of the world’s megacities, millions of citizens will be forced to bear the cost of this poor planning and governance.

Energy: A Conversation about our National Addiction

By Mark Palfrey and Tristan Becker

In March of 2006, the Department of Defense (DoD) hosted the first of a series of monthly lectures focused on energy security, efficiency, conservation, and cost reduction. Provocatively titled “Energy: A Conversation about our National Addiction”, the intent of the series is to increase awareness and understanding of America’s energy issues by providing a forum for sharing and collaboration. Just as the Defense Department played a critical role in forging the information revolution in past decades,” notes their website, “so can the Department play a similar critical role in fueling the energy revolution in coming decades.”

One of the leaders of this initiative is Mitzi Wertheim of the Center for Naval Analyses (CNA). Mitzi is convinced that positive results will come as more and more people from various backgrounds come together and contribute. Each month, the attendance has risen, bringing together an impressive following of senior leaders, academics, and researchers, from both inside and outside the government to “listen, learn, connect, share, and collaborate.”

As Dan Forrester’s Change Agents paper highlights, a successful transformational leader must develop a sense of urgency, and convince stakeholders and decision makers that the status quo is no longer acceptable. Mitzi’s comment at a recent event featuring Charles Zimmerman of Wal-Mart, underscored this point. Technology, she said, is not the obstacle we face in affecting a fundamental shift in our approach to the energy problem. We have the means. The challenge, rather, is in shifting people’s mindsets, and convincing them that change must occur.

Some of the speakers at past events, including upper-level executives and academics, have delivered powerful arguments for change on a wide-range of energy-related issues. These topics have included: Wal-Mart’s quest for energy efficiency, the emergence of photovoltaic technologies for military/commercial applications, conversion of waste byproducts into fuel, and an economics perspective on climate change. The future of the Energy Conversation lecture series is bright, with a backlog of new presenters seeking to share their expertise with the public.

In order for Energy Conversations to achieve their desired impact, an increase in collaboration of attendees and leaders must occur. To this end, the Energy Conversation group has created a website that will help facilitate the communication of ideas, initiatives, and experiences outside of the lecture hall. Change Agents who can frame a clear and compelling vision from the information and connections they have acquired from these lectures will be of paramount importance for creating the sense of urgency that is required to implement a large-scale, meaningful, and lasting change in the way the DoD and government approach energy.

Access the Energy Conversation’s website at www.energyconversation.org and register for next months lecture.

Back to the Basics

In a recent posting in the blog www.goodexperience.com, author Mark Hurst encourages us to explore the irony that often surrounds supposed ‘innovation’.  He says, ”the most innovative companies and people today are often those with the courage to ignore superficial fashions and strike out on their own paths. Sometimes this means creating something no one has ever seen before, like the iPod. More often it’s basic improvement: in a society obsessed with the newest trends and buzzwords, success can be as easy as doing the old thing that everyone else forgot along the way.”

Change agents can benefit greatly from this realization that innovation stems from imagination; whether revolutionary or very fundamental.  In the drive for impactful change, we are often so determined to push forward that the most simple, obvious solutions are overlooked.   Gary Foster, CIA’s former Deputy Director for Planning & Coordination, offers in closing, “A change agent is the person who carries the flag of a need. Usually not a generally recognized need.”  The need for innovation can be met in many ways, and we cannot overlook the simple beauty of going back to the basics.  

Upcoming: Change Agent Interview with Dale Meyerrose

This afternoon I had the pleasure of spending nearly an hour interviewing the Chief Information Officer for the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), General Dale Meyerrose. The General was very engaging and offered some new directions for change agents to consider. For one, he shared ideas around how people learn, including the idea that he learns best from “fascinating people.” He also offered powerful distinctions between probable, doable, and possible change.

The transcript from our interview will be released by his office in the near future and we will publish it in its entirety on this blog. The General also shared that this was his first blog interview so that was a nice angle to the conversation. Many thanks to my colleague Lisa Veith for making this interview happen.

“Crowdsourcing” And Change Agents

A nice tie to some of our recent posts is this recent article from Business Week’s Innovation section. Instead of calling it the wisdom of crowds, the term currently floating around is “crowd sourcing.” This refers to having problems resolved or concepts brought to life by harnessing the best thinking of many people (the collective group/community).

The government is in a very unique position to tap the concept of crowd sourcing, and already does so through mechanism such as hearing public commentary on proposed regulations. Yet I see crowd sourcing as distinct with the web playing a special role. If you have government examples of change agents using crowd sourcing please send them on at changeagents@sapient.com and we will post them.

The article calls out several examples of crowd sourcing, but these two from the text of Business Week particularly caught my attention.

“Gannett news-press.com Among the largest newspaper publishers in the U.S., Gannett has said it plans to change its newsroom to take advantage of crowdsourcing, putting readers to work as watchdogs, whistle-blowers, and investigators. Already last summer, the Fort Myers (Fla.)-based The News-Press (circulation 100,000) invited readers to help investigate ongoing concerns over price hikes in their utility assessments.

The response was hefty. Readers got involved—organizing their own investigations, poring through documents, and connecting to inside sources. As a result of the investigation, the city cut assessment fees by 30%.

Marketocracy Marketocracy.com Marketocracy’s Web site boldly announces a mutual fund that delivers higher return with less risk. Launched in 2000, Marketocracy aims to gather the collective knowledge of the best investors to create a highly successful mutual fund. Sign-up is free and anyone can run a virtual fund, starting with $1 million. So far, the site has more than 60,000 users. Based on the virtual investments of its 100 most successful members, the site launched the Masters 100 Index in 2001. The fund now has $44 million in assets and has outperformed the S&P 500 Index with an average annual return of 11.4% since inception. Five years in, that’s a decent performance, though not worthy of Warren Buffett.”