It’s been far too long since my last posting. The sun is melting the snow outside of our office here and it seems like nature is tapping me to end the winter-long freeze of writing on this blog…my apologies.
Anyways, I’ve been reading a book as of late called “A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future”. It’s a strong title, I know, but it seems that publishers have to resort to shouting these days to get their projects off the shelf and into the shopping cart. In any case, the author, Daniel Pink, makes a pretty compelling case that we are departing what he has dubbed “the information age” and are on the doorstep of the “conceptual age”. To summarize what this means, essentially Pink believes that the days in which financial rewards flow to those who can crunch numbers, draft legal documents, write code and generally excel at activities leaning heavily on the left hemisphere of the brain will give way to those who can effectively employ their creativity, empathize and see the big picture. In no way is Pink saying that programmers, CEOs and lawyers will be out of work. Rather, he is hypothesizing that the zeitgeist of the coming economy will be one in which the artist in each of us will be prized as the primary engine of progress. In a nutshell, to be able to make sense of the ocean of information the internet has unleashed, keep up with the complexity of globalization and solve humanitarian problems whose solutions span several disciplines demands the sort of holistic thinking that is the trademark of right-brained thinkers.
I closed “A Whole New Mind” and put it on my bedstand last night before going to sleep, but it was still fresh in my head while perusing the blogosphere this morning when I ran across a post on Riches for Good about a non-profit design firm called Design That Matters. The first thing that came to my head was the fact that this firm seemingly embodies almost all of the traits that Pink espouses. They are a vanguard of the “conceptual age”.
Design That Matters brings together volunteers from academia and industry to create products that will significantly improve the lives of the citizens of the developing world. Some of their incredibly creative products include “a rugged, lightweight, low-power projection system, which uses a microfilm cassette to store 10,000 pages of information at a fraction of the cost of paper books” as well as micro-credit smart cards that will allow microfinance institutions to grow without sacrificing security, accuracy or efficiency. Other projects include a low-cost incubator and isolation unit for babies born prematurely and an improved intravenous drip flow controller for hospitals in which nursing staff shortages can often lead to deadly errors by family members controlling the IV in their stead, while attending to loved ones.
If Daniel Pink is right and the future will by ruled by right-brainers, then Design That Matters is on the path to success. They see the big picture and have empathy in spades as demonstrated by their global reach and human-centric approach. Most importantly, however, is the fact that they have the incredible ingenuity and creativity to act with compassion on this vision. In a period of contraction and fear, it’s good to know that firms like Design That Matters still recognize that a bright future can only be wrought from empathy, creativity and the courage to act on the grand vision of a safer and more prosperous world for all of humanity.
When I was ten years old I landed myself in the emergency room with a forearm full of glass shards sitting just millimeters away from my ulnar artery. The glass was there because my brother and I were tormenting each other in the house and the chase ended with my arm going through a window. Luckily, my mom was in the house and whisked me off to the hospital. In the waiting room, I sat with my feet dangling from the chair while my mom simultaneously filled out insurance forms and held my arm in the air with a bloodsoaked rag, telling me everything was going to be okay. As it always is with mothers, she was more terrified than I was.
When it was my turn to be seen, I laid on my back and calmly watched as the doctors pulled pieces of glass out of my open flesh, washed the blood out with water and went in for more before finally sewing me up with over twenty stitches that zigzagged across my soft forearm. The doctor and nurses kept me going by telling me how tough I was for not crying when a soldier on the bed next to mine was bawling. Even now, my mom often recounts how incredible it was that I just sat and watched my ragged arm being fixed as though it belonged to someone else. I wasn’t tough. If that happened to me today, I’d probably react far more frantically than I did back then. I was just too naive to believe anything but what I was being told - “stay calm, you’re going to be fine, you’re a tough boy”.
At that age, you take everything for granted. I couldn’t comprehend that my mom wouldn’t be there to take care of me or that we wouldn’t have a car to drive to the hospital in or that competent doctors wouldn’t be on duty ready to put me back together. There isn’t even the tiniest sliver of doubt in a ten year old brain that if you get hurt someone will be there to fix you. Looking back, I wonder how different that situation would have been if I had happened to grow up in a warzone, a genocide or had just been unlucky enough to get trapped in a natural disaster. The medical care I thought was a natural right is unfortunately a luxury to many people in those situations. The certainty I had that everything was going to be taken care of and all I had to do was sit and wait for things to get better, is something every child should have, but doesn’t.
This is why Doctors Without Borders was formed. This amazing organization was founded on the belief that medical care should be offered with total neutrality to people of all races and backgrounds in all parts of the world. Their pledge of impartiality is part of what makes them such an amazing group of people because it ensures that their only concern is providing medical care to people who are suffering. Because 89% of their funding comes from private sources they are able to act totally independently of any political, religious or military agendas. As it says on their website, “MSF is neutral. The organization does not take sides in armed conflicts, provides care on the basis of need alone, and pushes for increased independent access to victims of conflict as required under international humanitarian law.”
Their impartiality doesn’t make them push-overs though. They always enter a new territory solely to offer medical assistance, but what they bear witness to on the job often compells them to act as whistle-blowers as well. Again, their website says, “In 1985, MSF spoke out against the Ethiopian government’s forced displacement of hundreds of thousands of its population; took the unprecedented step of calling for an international military response to the 1994 Rwandan genocide; condemned the Serbian massacre of civilians at Srebrenica in 1995; denounced the Russian bombardment of the Chechen capital, Grozny in 1999; and called for international attention to the crisis in Darfur in 2004 and 2005 at the United Nations Security Council.”
Doctors Without Borders truly gets it. They are human beings out to help other human beings. In an age where wealth distribution is becoming increasingly uneven, the selflessness of those lucky and wealthy enough to have gone to medical school putting their lives at risk for others is truly inspiring. No one wants to grow up in a place where there aren’t enough hospitals for everyone. Thank God that Doctors Without Borders is willing to try to fix that.
It’s extremely easy to look around today and find every reason to be pessimistic about the future. And, although I’ve always thought that there is a fine line between being optimistic and being unrealistic, I do think that real change always springs from a place of optimism and inspiration. In other words, if you want things to be good again at some point you’ve got to begin believing that is really possible.
We’ve already pretty much gone through the phase of opening our eyes to the grim state of affairs on the globe today - climate change, economic instability, etc. But, you can only cry over spilled milk for so long. Now that we’ve taken a good, hard look at the problems the next step is taking a deep breath and not just begin to move forward but to move forward with bold optimism.
Popular media is not helping us to do this. Major news outlets have a tendency to report on the disastrous because it makes for more compelling television. Very quietly, however, major changes are indeed taking place. I’m not just talking about change in laboratories and think tanks (though that’s happening too). I’m talking about real populist, grassroots change in areas like environmentalism, human rights, sustainable design, alternative energy and the list goes on. It’s a wave of human compassion pouring outwards and because it’s occurring at so many levels all over the globe, the greater trend at play probably won’t be recognized until we look back at it years from now.
Here are a couple of books that I love that address this trend, directly and indirectly, and will make you a lot more hopeful for the future. Change is possible. And it starts with a bit of optimism.
The Geography of Hope: A Tour of the World We Need
Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Social Movement in History is Restoring Grace, Justice, and Beauty to the World
Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things
It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything and I thought that it would only be appropriate to have an Olympic themed posting. Everyone always thinks the best commercials are made for the superbowl, but I tend to think that the most inspiring ones always seem to show up during the Olympics. Here are some of the best in breed.
Nike - I Can
Everything You Need is Already Inside
Kerry Strug
Derek Redmond
Another great article over at Creative Capitalism, with some good comments following it up.
Global recognition replaces local shame
After realizing that no one actually seems to have a coherent definition of creative capitalism, or at least no one can agree on one, I thought this made sense.
The crowd within
And the apocalypse…
The Apocalypse Makes Us Dumb
This article from the LA Times disturbed me a bit, but did not entirely surprise me. The more that I learn about traditional philanthropy it seems the more I am convinced that we can find new and better ways to approach the problems of our time. Whether some new form of capitalism is that solution waits to be seen. But, it’s articles like this one that give one pause about the current status quo.
For-profit fundraisers collect loads, but nonprofits see a sliver
And a bit of more upbeat news. Kiva has burst onto the world of social media, getting involved with the juggernaut that is Facebook.
Kiva + facebook = involver
Evolution, for some reason, is a touchy subject. Why it’s touchy I’ll never understand because I can’t imagine a better reason for standing in absolute awe of your preferred deity than if he/she/it had a hand in this most beautifully flowing process that gave rise to everything around us…or perhaps your god is that process. But, let’s leave religion aside (as much as possible) to consider just evolution itself for one second.
We’ve all got a general concept of what the process entails: the strong organisms survive to pass on their genes, those genes continue to be expressed and so every species, through its interactions with the greater ecosystem, is in a constant state of refinement towards the end of being better suited to survive and procreate. Where evolution gets really interesting is at the very tip where we find ourselves today.
This is a time when humanity is more interconnected and organized across the entire planet than ever before. Years from now we will look back with fascination at the way our species is coagulating on the internet, slipping and sliding across time zones, forming into groups and splitting like cells and generally merging into one great big organism unto itself. People move about the globe at incredible speed just like blood cells coarse through our veins and ideas are transferred just like signals from our brains fly along our nerves. We are more dependent on each other than ever before and more affected by the successes and failures of cultures halfway around the world as well. Somehow, we haven’t assimilated that concept yet.
Taking a brief glance over our shoulders, we can see that, in the time that has passed since the Enlightenment, humanity has increasingly seen itself as separate from and superior to nature. The health of our very home and the wellbeing of our own brethren have taken a backseat to the project of human progress. There’s truly no other explanation for the present state of pollution and mass extinction we have inflicted upon the planet than this grand illusion that somehow we’ve got no one to answer to but ourselves. We’re already begun paying the price for our self-imposed isolation from nature and the price is only moving upwards. I think that realizing our role in the grand scheme of evolution can help to solve the problems that we’ve caused believing we’re above nature.
The first step towards a peaceful symbiosis with the earth is recognizing that we are only one piece of the equation. We must recognize that as a species we’re not the general manager of the planet; we’re just another player on the team. Thankfully, it seems like this is beginning to happen. Books like The World Without Us are showing in very real terms that team earth will continue to play without us, and play quite well. In many cases the planet is better off. It’s a startling realization. It will take time, but it seems like we’re beginning to come to terms with this idea.
Being at the leading edge of evolution as we are, though, we’ve got the intelligence to be the star player. We’re just not living up to our potential and we need to find out how we can. So, the second step we can take as a species is to make sense of all this interconnectedness and organize our priorities. We are splitting ourselves into pieces running in ten different directions at once. We need people like Bjorn Lomborg, renowned Danish economist, at the helm to put things in perspective (for more info check out this video of him at TED). He’s come up with a startling ranking of the most cost-efficient global problems to put our money and effort towards and it will probably shock you how incredibly inefficient we are as a group. Horrendous humanitarian crises like malaria and malnutrition could be checked off the list in years and yet they seem to be placed lower on the list than global warming, which will take exponentially more money to fix and the results will take decades or more perhaps.
If humanity is becoming a meta-organism than it’s a paraplegic right now. Imagine how much more efficient we would be, how much more effectively we could address grand issues like global warming if we had access to the billions of potential Edisons, Einsteins and Salks on the earth right now who are hidden behind curtains of poverty and disease. Just imagine how much more talent this meta-organism is working with because of the civil and women’s rights movements…it’s staggering. Now, consider that there are a billion people on earth living on less than a dollar a day. We’re nowhere close to accessing the full capabilities of the human race.
I’ve always been amazed by massive schools of fish and flocks of birds that zigzag through water and air, cutting back and forth in complete unison at lightning speed. I’ve always wondered how it’s possible that such seemingly “dumb” animals are able to act as a single unit with such grace and speed. At some point, however, they didn’t do this I realized. They learned it. They evolved to do this. Although it seems obvious, it’s one of those incredible epiphanies to realize that these creatures learned over time to move together like this as a pack. It’s astonishing what even the tiniest form of life can accomplish when it has to. I can’t even begin to imagine humans trying to do the same thing as these birds and fish, whose brains are a fraction the size of ours. But, we can learn to fly and swim like them in our own way. We can act together as a unit just like them and become much more intelligent, quick and graceful than we are now. It’s becoming an evolutionary imperative that we do.
Clicking through the blog at Ted.com today, I came across something that absolutely made me glow. This initiative, in my opinion, represents the vision of what “aid” should be. It’s realistic, which is what makes me so hopeful. It won’t change Africa tomorrow or next year, but it will change the continent in 15, 20 and 25 years on. Real lasting change takes a long time and this program recognizes that. NextEinstein is a program that enables donors to contribute - money, materials, awareness - to AIMS (African Institute for Mathematical Sciences). The site points out that only Africans can solve their own problems and that Math and Science are the solutions to the poverty and violence that currently plague the land. I couldn’t agree more. I don’t mean to downplay the importance of writers, economists or any other profession, but let’s be honest, it was the scientists and engineers that cured polio, took us to the moon and even invented Pong. They get things done, they solve problems, they create new economies and they lift up their societies by doing so. Whatever grand solution one imagines for Africa must include this dynamic group. NextEinstein gave themselves the moniker from the idealistic concept that just maybe the next Einstein is waiting to be found in Africa. Who knows if that will happen, but I’ve got to say that this concept is a far more effective and pragmatic approach to the crises in Africa than throwing rock concerts around the world.
http://www.nexteinstein.org/
