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Author Archive | David

Climate existentialism

By on 26th August 2022

The hardest book I have read: The Uninhabitable Earth, Life After Warming. Climate change is a ‘hyperobject’, ‘a conceptual fact so large and complex that, like the internet, it can never be properly comprehended.’ We are burning more carbon than ever before when we should be slowing down. What if climate change happens faster than current models predict? Anyone notice that lakes and rivers are disappearing across continents? We assume that they will be coming back, amongst other assumptions. I pulled a few markings from the book, there are many more.

How much damage has been done in the last 30 years:

In fact, more than half of the carbon exhaled into the atmosphere by the burning of fossil fuels has been emitted in just the past three decades.

The problem of plastic:

And global plastic production is expected to triple by 2050, when there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish.

Expecting linear growth to continue:

Generations being as long as they are and historical memory as short, the West’s several centuries of relative reliable and expanding prosperity have endowed economic growth with the reassuring aura of permanence: we expect it, on some continents, at least, and rage against our leaders and elites when it does not come.

Climate change changes everything:

Nature is both over, as in ‘past.’ and all around us, indeed overwhelming us and punishing us–this is the major lesson of climate change, which it teaches us almost daily. And if global warming continues on anything like its present track, it will come to shape everything we do on the planet, from agriculture to human migration to business and mental health, transforming not just our relationship to nature but to politics and to history, and proving a knowledge system as total as ‘modernity.’

Fake news and mistrust:

That climate change demands expertise, and faith in it, at precisely the moment when public confidence in expertise is collapsing, is another of its historical ironies.

The scope of change and sacrifice required:

The cost is large: a decarbonized economy, a perfectly renewable energy system, a reimagined system of agriculture, and perhaps even a meatless planet.

Our responsibility towards future generations:

The possibility that our grandchildren could be living forever among the ruins of a much wealthier and more peaceful world seems almost inconceivable from the vantage of the present day, so much do we still live within the propaganda of human progress and generational improvement.

How much time do we have:

… the world has at most three decades to completely decarbonize before truly devastating climate horrors begin. You can’t halfway your way to a solution to a crisis this large.

Humans will go extinct before finding other civilizations and saving itself:

The natural lifespan of a civilization may only be several thousand years long, and the lifespan of an industrial civilization conceivably only several hundred. In a universe that is many billions of years old, with star systems separated as much by time as by space, civilizations might emerge and develop and then burn themselves up simply too fast to ever find on another.

Category design (Part two)

By on 5th March 2022

Picked up Play Bigger again. The concept of category design makes a lot of sense and cross-links to many concepts out there already. In a nutshell: define and create a new category, and then dominate the category by positioning yourself as the category king. It is hard to unseat category kings due to the many biases we are subject to, but more specifically:

  • anchoring effect: early information affects overall view
  • choice supportive bias: positive qualities to options we have chosen
  • groupthink bias: people embrace the category king simply because so many others have

The idea of category design stuck because it helps focus when designing a new business. Create or define clearly ‘where to play’, and then figuring out ‘how to win’. A category design approach reminds me of blue ocean strategy thinking as opposed to entering a red ocean. So then meanings when design is applied to different levels in an organization:

  • Company design: business model innovation
  • Category design: strategy design (blue ocean strategy as category design vs competing in a red ocean)
  • Product design: product innovation

Category design applied to careers

Category thinking comes to life when applied to one’s career. From Play Bigger:

Well, Dave, you have two choices in business and in your career. You can position yourself, or you can be positioned. And I’ve positioned myself as CMO in this company, and you’ve been positioned as the lowest person on the totem pole.

And it is about taking advantage of the exponential value of different versus the incremental value of better.

Category Design of Life

  1. Category is the strategy: “The best way to start a category and make yourself its king is to find one of those problems, concisely define it, and make sure others see it as you see it.”
  2. Find your category: “When you seek different, your aren’t climbing someone else’s ladder–you’re building your own ladder and putting yourself at the top rung.”
  3. Develop a point of view: “Putting yourself through a POV exercise can be incredibly clarifying. How do you define who your are and what you want to mean to the world?”
  4. Condition the market: “At work it might be a report to key superiors, or a presentation to a colleagues, or in the way you present yourself on LinkedIn or Twitter.”
  5. Design an ecosystem: “Form bonds that go beyond the walls of your company. Just like categories make category kings, other people make you successful.”
  6. Fire up a lightning strike: “For a person, a lightning strike can be both a great motivator and a life-changing event. A lightning strike is a huge public goal, which might range from performing a musical piece at a recital to major presentation at work.”
  7. Establish yourself, then expand your category: “This is how you grow, open up new opportunities, and generate more demand for yourself.”

I’d say the challenge is to keep doing all of the above consistently–a key trait of entrepreneurship is consistency.

Business Model Innovation

By on 3rd March 2022

I have been following how ‘business design’ is becoming part of the toolkit of digital and service designers. At the heart of any sustainable business is a profitable business model. Business model innovation goes hand in hand with product innovation. Understanding business model archetypes, the profitability of each, and how components can be recombined to create new business models is a fascinating area of study.

From The Business Model Navigator:

Tomorrow’s competitive advantage companies will not be based on innovative products and processes, but on innovative business models.

Elements of a business model

  • The customer: Who are the target customers?
  • The value proposition: What is offered to customers?
  • The value chain: How is the offering made?
  • The profit mechanism: Why does it generate a profit (why does it work commercially?)

As a rule of thumb, business model innovation differs from product or process innovation in that it significantly affects at least two of the four components of the who-what-how-why of a business model.

Challenges of business model innovation

Michael Porter’s ‘Five Forces’, the traditional way of thinking:

‘Blue Ocean Strategy’ approach to beat the competition by not competing directly with them.

The Business Model Navigator identified three reasons why companies struggle with business model innovation:

  1. Thinking outside the dominant industry logic.
  2. The difficulty in thinking in terms of business models rather than technologies and products.
  3. The lack of systematic tools.

Innovation is not a chaotic process but like any other discipline it needs methods and tools. This is where business model innovation comes in.

Radical Mycology

By on 3rd March 2022

I really enjoyed Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake. The chapter Radical Mycology really jumped out at me. There is so much in it that I’d like to follow up on that I decided to pull out some points here. In no specific order.

What I find interesting is the role fungi plays in breaking down and building structures. With potential to disrupt polluting industries in both waste and manufacturing.

The potential of Mycology to help address the challenges we face

It is not great surprise that the mess humans have made might look like an opportunity from a fungal perspective. Fungi have persisted through Earth’s five major extinction events, each of which eliminated between seventy-five and ninety-five percent of species on the planet. Some fungi even thrived during these calamitous episodes.

The inefficiency of many industries is a blessing to mushroom growers. Agriculture is particularly wasteful: Palm and coconut oil plantations discard ninety-five percent of the total biomass produced.

https://embed.ted.com/talks/lang/en/paul_stamets_6_ways_mushrooms_can_save_the_world

Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World

DIY Mycology

Today, after a long period of specialization and profesionalization, there is an explosion of new ways of doing science. “Citizen science projects”, along with “hackerspaces” have grown increasingly popular since the 1990s, providing opportunities for dedicated nonspecialists to carry out research projects.

  • Peter McCoy: Radical Mycology – develop fungal solutions to the many technological and ecological problems we face.
  • Mycologos: online mycology school – Knowledge about fungi is often inaccessible and hard to understand.
  • Mycotopia mushroom growing forum.

Mycofabrication and mycoremediation

Whereas mycoremediation is all about decomposing the consequences of our actions, ‘mycofabrication’ is all about recomposing the types of material we choose to use in the first place.

Around the world, the idea that fungi can be used to build things as well as break them down is starting to catch on. A material made from the outer layers of portobello mushrooms shows promise in replacing graphite in lithium batteries. The mycelium of some species makes an effective skin substitute, used by surgeons to help wounds to heal. And in the United States, a company called Ecovative Design is growing building materials out of mycelium.

There are people and organizations licensed to use Ecovative’s Grow It Yourself (GIY) kits in thirty-one countries, producing everything from furniture to surfboards.

Neglected megascience

In 2009, the mycologist David Hawksworth referred to mycology as a “neglected megascience.”

I studied biochemstry and genetics, also a semester in microbiology, but don’t recall much contact with mycology, especially the practical applications of it. I’m keen to create a container where I can learn more about mycology. Especially the potential for co-design and business building in how we live and address the challenges facing us.

Parallel diversity as a problem solving method

By on 3rd March 2022

Dave Snowden talks about trios, a concept similar to pair programming where a small diverse team of three people explore ideas and make prototypes. A trio links roles in inter-threaded patterns to see what is possible. The trio needs to have diversity across specialisms and generations to increase the likelihood of novel ideas.

The idea is to have 15 – 20 trios working in parallel. The outcomes are then sorted and selected and put into a traditional design process (the example used in the talk is software design). The approach differs from a traditional consulting project where a small team of experts create prototypes within tight project plans. For the right problem it may make sense to have many people tackling the issue, but you would need willing clients to go with this approach. Nonetheless I’m becoming more interested in distributed problem solving vs. expert problem solving.

The topic is introduced at 25:13.