Robert Paterson's Weblog

Networks and Trust - The New Evolution

Last week, prompted by pressure from my son to be more clear about networks in my upcoming book - You Don't need a Job - You need a Need a Network - some new thoughts pushed their way to the front and I wanted to share them with you in sketch book form.

Please help me get them more clear.

The Network Effect and the Trust Network Effect - There is a difference that is important. In the standard network effect, the value of the network to each member is linked to the growth of the connections. It is transactional. So the more phones that are connected to the network, the more valuable the network is in utility to each member. This is the mechanical approach to networks.  

For many people that I see using social media, this is their only goal. Many try and get as many "friends" as possible. If you are a real A lister - this works - you have influence. But for most people, having 7,000 friends on Facebook or Twitter doesn't mean a thing - IF YOU NEED SOMETHING.

I have been working a lot recently using Indiegogo and observing people who seek to raise money using crowd sourcing.

In every case that I have seen so far, the campaigns that worked had activated their core circle of trusted people who themselves had such a circle - who had such a circle and so on. It was this inner circle that did the work. The campaigns that just threw the ask out to the general network, tended to fail. There was no power to the general ask for help. 

Why is this? If I have 3,000 friends on facebook - why don't they help me - they say they are committed but they don't act?

I think of my own behaviour. I will only act if a few people that I know well and trust ask me. For the rest, the answer is always no. How small is this group? Maybe 8 and no more that 30+ depending on the context.

This is my real network. I only act on strong ties not weak.

It may extend further on occasion to people who used to be in the inner circle but for whom time has passed and they have moved further out. So an ex close colleague or friend can call out of the blue and I will be ready to act. They remain people who have been trusted, Any of you who have served in the military will know this. When a ex shipmate or buddy calls, you go back immediately to where you used to be in trust.

I am seeing that this inner circle of trust is the "leverage". You have to pay attention to your reputation and to your inner network. To get you have to give. It's all barn building. 

A high quality inner network is the goal.

This quality is all based on trust. So if I am right, then the drive for many friends is a waste of time and is based on the simple view of the network. We are not simple, we are complex humans! No Trust - No Commitment or Action.

The New Super Trust Leverage - Trust Platforms - What is new then and what I think is the Highland Park Game Changer - are platforms that create this level of trust among people who have never met!

Airbnb is a good example. Here is a platform that enables you to offer your place for rent to strangers. Etsy is another. Here is a platform that enables you to sell your crafts to strangers. Amazon is enabling a new publishing system for the "small" author. Visa is another. Visa is a platform that enables a retailer to take your money safely.

They key to all of these platforms is that they mediate and maintain high levels of trust. Thus enabling us to DO THINGS with small vendors and to be small vendors on a global scale.

They also do this at a very low cost. No Budget hotel chain can compete with Airbnb in price and value. No storefront with Etsy. No publisher can do what Amazon is doing for the small author. This trust mediation gives both sides of the transaction a deal that is impossible for the Factory model to replicate.

There is also a huge secondary impact. That is, as each of us buys from another in trust platforms, the trust that was at first mediated, becomes real. We tend to go back to the same places on Airbnb because we get to know and like each other. We get in touch with authors who use Kindle and start to have a real relationship with them.

So what I see is that the product of each successful transaction in trust platforms is the exponential increase in trust. This in turn increases the utility for all. The line between provider and consumer becomes blurred. This then is when an author can get crowd funding to help him write the new book! This is when the farmer can pre-sell his crop or meat in the spring for delivery in the fall.

The value is not confined to the connections alone but to the overall trust in the system.

This is the game changer. This is a much much better deal for all than the Highland Park system. It was Highland Park that overthrew the old local and artisan system because it was then a better deal for all. So I think Trust Platforms will overthrow the Highland Park world. 

Highland Park was the new factory that Henry Ford opened in 1910 that had all the new features of the Production Line installed. It was the DNA of the process that would be at the heart of all modern institutions. Mass Production killed the small and the local because it could offer a car for much less money than one made by hand by artisans. It also gave a large unskilled work force much more money than a day labourer job could. Both sides of the mass market were created.

This better deal meant that The small and the local got pushed to the fringe. The family farm nearly died. The local paper died. The bakery, dairy, butcher, general store, iron foundry all died. The local banker who knew everyone was no longer needed. The local doctor who had a stake in the health of his community was no longer needed. The local diner that held the community together was no longer needed. All were replaced by Highland Park. And so we ended up Bowling Alone - for as community died, so did Trust.

All became simple transactions. 

We all came to depend on a few vast organizations for all that is important for us. Vast organizations that not only do not care for us but work only for their own needs now. For the Highland Park Contract has been broken. Now most of us have the wages of day labourers, if we are lucky! Now most of the products and services are of low quality or worse, hurt us. 

We are ready for something better and something better is here. 

It's early days. It is maybe the equivalent of 1920. But I see Trust Platforms taking over the role of Highland Parks. They will do this because they are a better system. They offer more value to all. The evolutionary Tipping Point is 20%. Each time the trust platform takes 20% of the gross out of the sector, the Highland Park alternative will fall. 20 employees at Craigslist did this and look what happened to the mass production newspapers.

When 20% of kids  choose the Platform rather than school, most of the universities will fold. When 20% of us stop going to the doctor for our chronic illness, how will they and big pharma cope? Coming will be a local food system that is based on trust and real food. When 20% of us buy all our food locally, how will Big Food cope?

Highland Park is trapped by their fixed process costs. With a 20% loss of gross and a trend of lower gross as the network grows, they cannot stand.

Evolution will work quite well and has a good chance of solving what seems to be the impossible world situation in front of us.  

Why Modern Medicine is a Fail for Chronic Illness - And What will replace it

Why has modern medicine failed to stop the chronic illness epidemic? My quick answer is this. Modern Medicine has been captured by a simple linear idea of how the world works. It can only deal with local and simple problems. It cannot comprehend complex problems. It keeps trying to use simple tools, a pill based on one pathway that are based in the simple idea of cause and effect.

This all came from early success. 

Joseph Lister created a breakthrough in medicine in the 1860's when he discovered that you could prevent infection in major operations by washing your hands and spraying the site with carbolic acid. Of course it took more than 10 years to be accepted but by the 1890's surgery did not mean a high chance of dying from infection.

Lister solved a problem that was simple and local. Keep the wound clean. Keep all that touch the wound clean. Keep the room where you treat the wound clean. Jenner did the same with small pox. Vaccinate with a close relative and you create immunity. 

That is progress. But it is also the problem. Ever since then medicine wants the simple answer. It's early success in treating the simple has trained it to see only local cause and effect. 

This is why it has failed and can only fail in treating chronic illness. For Chronic Illness is a complex problem brought on by interactions between your ancestry, the food you eat, what you do with your body, how much time you spend outdoors, your social status and how much sleep you have. There is no local cause. There is no one cause. There is only many variables interacting over long periods of time that result in emergence of disease that in turn result in the emergence of more disease.

You become obese, then you might develop Type 2 Diabetes, then heart disease, then eye problems and so on. Or you might get depressed and then get an auto immune disease such as IBS or worse. 

Modern medicine treats each new disease as a stand alone. Much of the treatment drives further disease.

Our failure to see the difference between what can be seen as simple and local and what is complex is what is at the root of our failure.  Now chronic illness is an epidemic. Every decade in the 20th century it has got worse. Since 1980, the epidemic has accelerated exponentially. Billions of dollars has been spent in "research". The entire medical world has been looking for answers. And they have failed. Why?

I had a flash this weekend as I was doing a final edit for the first book of my series You Don't need a ..." Modern Medicine, like all of our industrial institutions, has a machine design. All are based in a core process that ends in the sale of a product or a procedure.

Modern medicine is a linear world where the pay off is in the sale of a drug, a test, or a procedure such as an operation or a Botox shot. No one gets paid to work with complexity. So no one does. 

All of Modern Medicine is focused on finding direct cause and effect pathways that end in a transaction that is based also on a mass market model. So in this world, depression can be "cured" by one pill. 

If I am correct - what do you think pile in please - then we cannot expect any results from medicine. Medicine is captured by the fallacy that all linear institutions share of the world being linear and so reducing all interaction to a single payoff - a classroom with a teacher - a newspaper with a journalist - a pill with a doctor.

All the money you raise to go to this research is wasted. All the money we spend in this model is wasted. Investing more in the study of epicycles is not going to make the Ptolemaic system work any better.

So what to do?

Dave Snowden's Cynefin model says it all for me. Modern Medicine lives in the right hand quadrant but our chronic illness lives in the left hand side. 

I don't think that the profession of medicine will welcome this insight. After all they all make their money and gain their status by their investment in the fallacy.

But we can help ourselves. For the systemic causes of chronic illness are all rooted in our lifestyle and in our ancestry. While complex they have only 4 quadrants.

1. Diet - Eat real food - give up all processed food - give up all grains and sugars - don't eat any food that has a chemical in it that you cannot read aloud
2. Be Active - Don't sit for more than 3 hours a day - Do physical work - be outside for at least an hour a day - get a dog - garden - get a standing desk
3. Get a Tribe - You will thrive when you have a real place and status in a  social group - we are primates - we have to groom and be groomed
4. Sleep More - Sleep is not just a mechanical time out - it is a vital part of keeping us renewed and well - we need 8 hours a day - have a dark room - light is the enemy - don't watch TV in bed - don't read in bed - don't get stimulated before bed

There is then one variable about how all of this interacts and that is our ancestry. The closer you are to beig a Hunter Gatherer, the worse the outcomes of breaching the evolutionary norms for these quadrants. That is why First Nations People, Polynesians and Scots and Irish do do badly in the chronic illness spectrum. 

There are no doctors in this picture are there? There will be a new research world though. A Big Data Crowd Sourced world. Where millions of us will share data about who we are - the ancestry variable and what we are doing and then we will start to see the emergent truth of what works best for you and for me. 

Emergence is the new research frontier. But the powers that be will hate that because there is no transactional payoff. There will be no pill. There will be no procedure. There will be only the knowledge that what you and I are eating or doing is working or not for us as individuals. 

We will have to find a new way of setting up this kind of research. 

Trillions of dollars of cost will go away. There will be a true revolution in health and in human society. 

Much more later this fall when I will release "You Don't Need a Doctor" I am still on track to release "You Don't Need a Job" and "You Don't need a Banker" at the end of June.

The Vet College opens it walls - Learn about wild life May 22

The Atlantic Vet College is starting to open its walls. The plan is to make more and more of what it does available to the public online. 

We start on May 22 with a livestream of a popular workshop on how best to interact with wildlife. On PEI we all have foxes and coyotes close to us. We all have birds and skunks. How do we coexist best with these neighbours?

As we learn how best to do this - we will expand our online outreach. You can find out more about hoew to get connected by joining the AVC Friewnds and Family Community - it's free and organizes a lot of cool events such as Vet Camp and the ever popular Open House where all kids who love animals have a whirl.

Here is the info:

People and wild animals are increasingly crossing paths, which can result in human-wildlife conflicts. AVC will present a community workshop entitled “Living with Wildlife” on May 22, from 7-9:30 p.m. in Room 287N, The McCain Foundation Learning Commons at AVC.

A team of wildlife experts will provide information and answer questions about the “do’s and don’ts” of dealing with wild animals. The speakers include Dr. Marion Desmarchelier, AVC Zoo, Exotic Animal and Wildlife Service; Dr. Heather Fenton, AVC Wildlife Pathology Resident; Chuck Gallison, PEI Department of Fish and Wildlife; and Jody Kocsis, Technician, AVC Zoo, Exotic Animal and Wildlife Service.

Admission is free, and everyone is welcome. The workshop is part of AVC’s award-winning Community Workshop Series and is sponsored by AVC Friends & Family.

People who are not able to attend the workshop in person are invited to view it live at a link that will be added towww.upei.ca/avc/friendsand family on the evening of May 22.

The London Tube Map - An example of how we might map social systems?

Here is a delighful short documentary by the BBC on the Tube Map. The breakthrough in its design by Harry Beck is that it focused not on the reality of the geography - that is so complex - but on making the links and connections very clear. You as a travellor always know where to go and how to get there. Here is a nice link to more information. 

Here is the 1933 Map

As I watched this I started to wonder about whether this principle might apply to mapping social networks?

What do you thinK?

 

 

How safe are you online? Some great tips

Created by: Online Marketing Degree

How can a choir become a Social Object?

This is a story about using "Story". The challenge was this. A small team of Alumni and from WDAV a Public Radio station in Charlotte NC had organized a tour for the Choir of the Cathedral from my old college at Oxford, Christ Church. We of course wanted full houses. We did  not have the money to do PR in the old way. How then could we use the web instead?

How could we make the choir into a "Social Object"?

This is how we pulled this off with the help of Tom King our wonderful web guru and ex chorister himself. 

The web is more than the tools and technology. We love stories about people. We love to have our say. We love to go behind the scenes. The community knows more than any expert. An engaged community can do far more than the hardest working individual. The web can unlock these forces. 

Using this context, we set out to use the web to tell a story and so engage a community. For we knew that more than 60 million people sing or have sung in a choir in America. Could we tap into this? Could they do the work?

At the outset we set the context. Before the tour began, we produced a deep background series on the Choir itself. Here is one of the videos about the choir. What was our history, who were the people and what was their life like. Here is an amazing interview with 2 choristers.  Here is a piece on the Choristers.

 

We did the same for the music. We have to care about that too before we hear it. Here is Christ Church rehearsing in Toronto with their Host Choir from Grace Church. 

We have to care also about the places. Every host had their own space too where we made it easy for their local community to know what would happen and how to get tickets. Here at Grace Church on the Hill in Toronto is how we supported every venue. 

By the time the choir boarded the plane, the world of the tour had been vividly drawn and a community of support had been brought to life. 

We then set up a process and the rules for how all those who were directly involved in the tour could tell their own story. Singers, radio stations, hosts, parents, friends and family took up their cameras and pens and covered every moment of the tour. We used facebook and people also sent Tom and I material that we put onto the site daily. Here we are in New York. The story unfolded like a Dickens book in daily chapters that were as novel to the author as to the reader. So all was fresh and exciting.

We got what we wanted - full houses and standing ovations all the way.

And as a result, we saw something new and unexpected. Firstly, we could see that the Cathedral is no longer bounded by its walls. We can implant the cathedral in the hearts of people. Secondly, we could see that we at the centre do not have to do all the work. We are no longer constrained by our own limited resources. With the right invitation, the community will do the work. 

We know now that the future of the choir is now tied into the web in this way. Is it not for you too?

The full web story is here.

2 Million Pageviews on this Blog - Thank You

Thank you all my wonderful readers

A Fractal History of the World - Part 1 - Where are we and where are we going

I know that I am not alone in being worried about the state of the world today. Are you? My reaction has been to see if I could find a way of seeing things so that I could understand.

I needed to know where are are - how we got here and where we might be going. I needed context.

So I have been writing a very short book. It is all but finished and I thought now might be a good time to show you at least the premise of the book. So here is Chapter 4 - The Map.

True Health - Part 4 - The Push Back to Paleo and what it means

First they ignore you - then they laugh at you - then they fight you - then you win.

Today I am going to explore how we are about to experience all of this as we see the power of the Corporate World - more powerful than the Empire in India - go down. We see it now in media but we will see the final battle in the arena of health and food.

It is going to be in this area where the public will awake and discover how they and their children have been betrayed. I will show you today how betrayal is the key flash point of revolution that spreads the meme beyond the initiating cadre to the mass. 

All Imperialists from Rome to Britain and the Institutional/Corporate World have had the best of intentions. For after all Rome did actually do a lot good things. But the price of Empire is loss of freedom. And in the end this is what we all want. Espcially if Empire can no longer offer good roads, peace and justice etc.

The road to Freedom often starts with a funny man in a dhoti. How the Titans of the Empire laughed at Gandhi then. 

This process of ignoring - laughing - fighting and losing is what happens to the establishment in any paradigm shift. Who in 1935 could imagine the British Empire leaving India?

Who can imagine the Corporate Titans of our own time losing control of us?

Today time speeds by - what took decades now takes years. The Mad idea of working with nature and using her models, is very new. Maybe only 20 years old. In terms of a coherent way of eating and its relation to food maybe a decade. Blogging about this began in 2005!

In less than 6 years, millions are involved. The time of "Ignoring" has past.

The old system's immune system has been alerted. And the laughing and the attacks have begun.

"Paleo" is being talked about by the mainstream media as a joke - the Caveman Diet. Just another fad. Ignoring the point that this is not a diet but part of a larger context of health - that of aligning how we live to our evolutionary past.

Expect more "Jokes".

The "Attack" is all about Food Safety.

We are seeing concerted attacks on people who raise animals in a truly safe way - small egg flocks - people growing veggies in their front yard. They tell the mainstream that this food is not safe. Ignoring that the factory systems food is at the centre of our long term chronic health crisis.

Expect more attacks designed to raise the fear of the public and fear among the pioneers.

They will "burn" them as heretics. In modern terms they will humiliate us and take away our livliehood. And do it all in the context of keeping the rest of us safe from heresy. 

The establishment are powerful not just because they have a few Titans at the top but because there are so many functionaries below them. People who make their living and have their power as a result of being in the system. 

But the smart revolutionary does not attack this group. They depend utterly on the Titan. When he goes they go too. The News of the World staff get fired and cannot be rehired. The Mubarak inner circle and support melt away when their man falls.

But they cannot be ignored - they will be the ones who attack the new. Not the Titan himself.

You cannot win by attacking this system directly. They will crush you.

You win by allowing them to commit an outrage on you! It's very Zen!

The Titans destroy themselves by going too far in their attacks. At some point they outrage the sleeping people. 

In India, the innocents were killed at Armritsar. 

Look at what is going on in England now. The entire political class in the UK now has to step back from Murdoch. His henchmen/women have gone too far.

The people did not mind the Hugh Grants of the world or the Royals being hacked. But they cannot tolerate the families of war dead, of murdered children being the targets. And now that Gordon Brown has been seen as being defiled by the Titan, all can see that the only way ahead now to to sweep Murdoch away.

The people move when THEY feel the injustice and the betrayal.

So now to us. What will be the moment?

I see two tracks tnat interact. The power of social media and the increase in awareness that we are all being betrayed by the system.

The power of social media means that the secrets of the Titans can no longer be hidden. The big betrayals are amplified by social media. The power of social media means that dictators can no longer oppress their people without the world looking on. The more they assault their own people - such as in Libya and Syria - the more inevitable it is that they lose.

So what about us in the west. The scale of the deception and so betrayal builds every day.

• The War in Iraq was based on a lie
• We have also lost in Afghanistan trying to support the unsupportable
• The press is being shown to be mainly in the pockets of its owners - it has done its best to hide the truth
• Wall Street owns the recovery and the people are bereft - there is no growth in employment
• The young in Europe and the old are shut out
• The Euro zone and America's credit are on the knife edge but we were told that we have to pay back the bankers

Meanwhile the old contract is being destroyed

• The pensions that boughtv our obediance when we worked for them are going
• The schools and roads that we paid for are in ruins
• The justice system is being gamed
• Even our water system is for sale
• We don't own our homes annymore
• Our children did all we asked and there are no jobs
• We are told that we are not safe and our liberties are removed

You can add to this list - the reasons for consent are melting.

All of this is coming out of the New Media and the stories get bigger and get more traction every day - the Titans are shown not to care about us. They are shown to be cynical manipluators.

And now we come to the big lie - that our health and old age will be looked after by a Ponzi scheme of the transfer payments. 

This demographic and fiscal crisis will be the battle ground where the revolt will take place.

Rising oil and food prices and the debt crisis will all come together and the people will have nothing to lose by taking the risk of leaving the system. 

The entire basis of the western deal with its people will unravel and the people will be betrayed just when they are the most vulnerable.

So what to do? What do you and I do? Not easy question to answer but just as there are patterns of history that show us how true paradigm revolts take place, there are patterns that can help us see our best choices and what will happen in a pattern sense as the revolt gets under way.

Check back in a couple of days.

 

The world of Mad Men is over in Business - Why it has to go in healthcare - Why Social Media offers so much

Once upon a time there were department stores that sold everything. They hardly exist anymore. Why? because we get a better deal from specialty stores. Once upon a time there were record albums where many songs were in one package. We don't buy albums anymore. If we buy any music we buy songs. 

We used to rely on advertising. Increasingly we use our trusted personal networks to help us navigate the market.

It used to take millions to make complex things but more and more we are seeing new tools that can do big things for very little cost.

The world of Macy's and Mad Men is over. But not in health care

Today we have a department store model for healthcare. Today we use all the old models of business in healthcare. 

So what might a truly modern view of health care look like?

This is where Clayton Christensen's new vision for Healthcare makes so much sense to me.

Here in one page is the guts of CC's case. All of these models are combined today in the healthcare model and are rooted in the most expensive part of the system - the doctor's office and the hospital. It's all Macy's in the 1950's. It's big and aggregated into one high overhead system that has massive organizational friction and so low quality.

Clayton Christensen is advocating that we break this up as happened to the department stores. Then each part of the mix woudl get the best deal!

Imagine each part of this mix being pulled out as CC suggests:

1. Fee for Service - Here you pay a lot to get the best shot at finding out what the problem is when what is wrong is not clear. "House" on steroids. The McKinsey model.
2. Fee for Outcome - Specialized units that focus on doing one proceedure well - we see this already with hernia operations - you are much better going to a specialist clinic - lower overhead - better operational process - better outcomes. 
3. Membership as the Model - A social network aggregated around similar issues. Such as Type 2 Diabetes etc. Here prevention and living with a diease or the life changes needed to cure us will take place. None of these tasks can be done by a doctor as we currently organize health. Nor should they. They can best be done by us the pubic. For here the issue is how we live and of course getting off our addictions.

How to do this?

CC offers the playbook here too. It is very unlikley that the system will reform itself to do this. Systems don't do that. The system will have to be disrupted from below.

Diagnosis - Most GP's refer complex cases of all kinds up the line as it is. They are in reality traffic directors. They can treat only very minor problems. Most of the time they simply write a prescription. They are so time pressed that they cannot help with prevention. They are not paid for that anyway. The real issue for most of their patients is that they have a chronic disease such as heart disease or type 2 diabetes. All of these diseases are based on lifestyle. Not the Dr's forte. Drugs are the proxy for health.

CC is suggesting that we see high end diagnosis as a field in itself. This does not have to be based in one hospital.

Just as a hospital or a Dr's office has low skills and high overheads - Specialty Clinics have high skills and low overheads.

In Canada we have a start here in specialty clinics such as the Shouldice Clinic - If you have a hernia you would be silly to go anywhere else. This is what CC means as fee for outcome and this type of clinic can generate such process expertise as to all but guarantee a good result. The Shouldice is the specialty retailer that replaced the department store. 

Changing all this above is hard work as it involves changes to the system as it is. 

What interests me the most is the largest group at the bottom where groups of people with say Type 2 Diabetes can get together an help each other.

The new frontier for health that can grow up in spite of the system is "Community Health". Where you and I take charge of our health and use simple and powerful tools and each other to stay healthy, get healthy and help each other at rock bottoms costs.

• In using diagnostic and measurement tools - as with all other tools more and more diagnotic tools that used to ve expensive and hard to use are available at prices and levels of complexity that you and I can use. 
• In learning more about their condition - as with the publication of the bible in the 16th century, information that was restrricted ony to Dr's is widely available to all of us now. Many know more about their condition that theur GP who has to be so broad. 
• In learning about diet - we are learning that diet is at the heart of most of the diseases of medern life. Dr's know nothing abut this. Changing our diet is often beyond our power alone.  We need the help of our peers.
• In helping each other makes the hard lifestyle changes they need to take back control. No expert can help here - only peers.

Here the skilled part is in Facilitation. This is where 85% of the system will reside. 

Here is I think where the power of social media combined with what we are learning about the true causes of most modern disease offers us so much.

We could all get more healthy at a fraction of the cost of the current system - cost to us as individuals and as societies.

This is the revolution that is ahead.