We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely âE.O. Wilson
Technology innovation seems to be the best path for making utilities and services accessible to millions of people. But somewhere down the road of having been mechanising for the past century, we have lost the vital connection between design and production, eroding the very foundation of individual expression. Organisations have the power to forge a new path, to craft conditions for a thriving culture and institutions to breath life into the individual expression.
Technology Is Good Actually
Tech is our best path for lowering the cost of utilities and services. People need those things to survive, so making them cheaper is a moral necessity. 940M people globally do not have access to electricityâthe infrastructure is too expensive, and they are too poor to afford it. 3B people do not have access to clean cooking fuels. You cannot simply regulate your way out of a problem of this scale. Governments will subsidize and nonprofits will donate, but my sense is that innovation is the way out of this. The only reason my great-grandma was able to afford plumbing was because it became cheap enough that even subsistence farmers could afford it.
Evan Armstrong | 12 Minutes
Why the definition of design might need a change
By the 18th century, the British pioneer Josiah Wedgwood had deployed both artists and âmasterâ potters to make illustrations and models. The intent was to allow for consistent, large-scale pottery productionâin Wedgwoodâs own words, to âmake such Machines of the Men that cannot Err.â But in addition to eliminating workersâ scope for error, it brought an end to their individual expression. And it was the subsequent and literal mechanization of production that firmly separated the work of designing from makingâwith profound consequences for the definition of design, as a word and as a structure of our society.
Nicholas de Monchaux | 7 Minutes
Organisational Evolution & the Power of Competitive Ecosystems
Continuous iterative improvement within a highly competitive environment, and subject to tight feedback loops, will always produce better outcomes than a top-down âintelligent designâ approach led by people in authority. And yet, this is still not how organisational ecosystems are governed and run for the most part⌠You cannot design a culture the way you create an office layout. You canât force talented people to work for you. You canât mandate psychological safety, innovation, or well-being. You can, however, create the conditions or containers where it is more likely that these things will emerge.*
Lee Bryant | 6 Minutes
The right questions to ask about TikTok
There is this tension, that if you own your network and your subscribers, can that be combined with you being in some system that can get your more subscribers? Because it seems to me that inherently a system that can get your more subscribers is one in which you are dependent on other peoplesâ decisions, and you are dependent on them to point at you as opposed to someone else. And so now you kind of donât own it in quite the same way⌠A system that gives me traffic will also not give me traffic, and I donât control that. If you are on Instagram or Youtube and they can just down rank you and then you donât get any traffic. Thatâs the trade-off you are taking.
In Another Podcast | 40 Minutes