Disruptive Conversations

Sheeza Shah goal is to improve lives and improve the environment. She founded a crowdfunding company called UpEffect. UpEffect works to support sustainable, high impact revolutionary products that are making a difference in people's lives. Her platform as a 100% success rate because they work with these companies to help them market their idea. Other crowd funding platforms have high rates of failure because the people using these platforms do not realize the work it takes to bring these campaigns to the market.

Sheeza is leveraging technology to provide support for social enterprises. As a Muslim woman she finds that her faith grounds her in her work. She attributes her faith to her desire to prioritize creating value for people before creating value for herself. Sheeza is very critical of companies who claim to be doing good, but do not have the metrics to back that up. What she looks for in the companies she supports is what data are they using to know that they are changing the world. The look at the
1.The strength of the entrepreneur and their team.
2.The impact metrics they are using
3.What is their business model
Companies that do not meet these criteria do not make it on to the platform. She wants to ensure that these companies are in the best position to succeed. One of the key things she emphasizes is that no one should be able to beat you in terms of knowledge in the business you are building. Entrepreneurs need to understand their clients and build their business around that understanding. Their habits, the problems they face, and the needs they have.

Her goal is to inspire and support entrepreneurs in their goal to come forward with solutions and to take those ideas to market so they can disrupt these various marketplaces. Building a company is not easy. Sheeza points out that although she has experienced many failures she sees these failures are learning opportunities. For her knowing that it is okay to restart your business model has been an important lesion for her.

Links in the podcast:
https://www.theupeffect.com/
https://twitter.com/theupeffect/
https://twitter.com/Sheezaahmad
https://www.samasource.org/team

Ritu Bhasin is on a mission to create a more empowered and inclusive world. As an inclusion professional, advisor, public speaker, and now author. She works with senior leaders from around the world to help them improve their approaches to talent management and leadership development. Her main job is to help her clients do a better job at inclusion. In some ways, her work is about helping the underdog.

Ritu’s story is powerful. She started her career as lawyer, but found that her lack of being able to be authentic in that space made her profoundly unhappy. In her forthcoming book, she describes how as human beings, we crave belonging. We long to be part of communities. In our quest to belong to communities, we conform to what we think society the world would like us to be which is hard work. What she proposes, is a radical commitment to authenticity. She is challenging the world to be authentic in as many moments as possible.

In the episode, we talk about how her notion of the authenticity principle might be received in the business world. We talk about how some people may see it as flaky but for Ritu, it is an integral part transforming the business world. She is committed to building a world where people feel safe enough to bring their authentic selves into whatever space there are participating in. She asks the question:
•How do we create a world where we can embrace not only who we are as individuals but encourage other people around us to bring their differences to bear?

The answer to that question is complicated and we explore it more in the show, but part of the answer is that our world pushes conformity. As a result, when peoples emotional and physical energy is spent confirming, they are not fully engaged in their work. As a result, people are disenfranchised, disempowered, disconnected and disengaged from sections of our society where they could make a greater contribution if they were allowed to show up as their authentic selves.

If I were to distill the main message of this podcast episode, it would be around Ritu’s three selves model. She argues that each of us has three selves:
•The Authentic Self
•The Performing Self
•The Adaptive Self.

The authentic self is who you really are. The person that you would be in the world if you felt there were no consequences for being authentically you. Then there is the performing self. This is the mask we project into the world. The self we think we need to be if we are to move forward in the world. Finally, there is the adapted self. This is middle ground, the self who consciously chooses to adapt their authentic self to meet the needs of society. Her point is that you do not need to choose between being completely authentic and completely inauthentic, but there is a middle ground that can help you thrive in a world that encourages conformity. For more on her three selves model I would listen to the podcast and dive into her book.

Finally, Ritu has two pieces of advice for anyone who wishes to disrupt a sector or system.
•Be authentic. Be the change you wish to see in the world.
•Be relentless. Know that change is slow hard work, but never give up. Embrace the inner Jack Russell in you in you and be relentless.
Hope you enjoy this episode.

Links mentioned in the podcasts:
https://ritubhasin.com/
https://twitter.com/Ritu_Bhasin

In this thoughtful episode, I speak with Nick Scott the Director of Open Government and Innovation in New Brunswick, Canada. In this episode, referencing Zaid Hassan, Nick makes the point that the original sin of complex challenges is the belief that you can change things without changing yourself. This is a wonderful and insightful episode on innovation within government. A word that is not usually associated with the public sector, but Nick break some myths and misconceptions here. One of the main things we discuss is the role of open government in the future of public sector and decision-making.

Nick and I explore how we are learning more about innovation within in big bureaucratic organizations. He makes that point that innovation is changing and that the cost of not innovating is too high for us not be boldly creating the conditions that foster innovation.

He argues that if innovation is  to be successful in the public sector, it will need to improving the currency of trust with citizens. His goal is to change the quality of the relationships between governments and citizens so we can improve overall quality of life. He explains that innovation does not occur within organization or institution but as a result of the flow of information across and between organizations. There is no one organization that has the capacity to respond any of these complex challenges alone. There needs to be a change in culture and teams need to operate in a way that reflects the way you want the organization to work. We need to collaborate generously and share more innovation. The more we share innovation, the more value we can create. Change comes through hard work and reflection and it may take some time, but we are the ones who need to do the work.

Hope you enjoy this wonderfully thoughtful episode.

Note: Open Government is based on three principles - participation, transparency, and collaboration.

Links mentioned in the podcast:

Selling social change: https://ssir.org/articles/entry/selling_social_change

Wheeling in the Trojan Mice: https://ssir.org/articles/entry/wheeling_in_the_trojan_mice

In praise of maintenance: http://freakonomics.com/podcast/in-praise-of-maintenance-2/

Link to Beith Noveck: http://www.thegovlab.org/beth-noveck.html

Huda Idrees describes herself as a writer, entrepreneur, engineer and product designer. In this episode, Huda describes how path to entrepreneurship started when she was twelve years old. In the story she shares, she describes how this early experience taught her that something she loved doing, programming. She learned that her skills as a programmer can create value and she happened to enjoy building things on the internet.

Today, Huda is a taking a bold step to redefine healthcare in Canada. She is the founder of Dot Health and she is making a big bet that Toronto has the best preexisting conditions to demonstrate to the world a radically new approach to integrative healthcare. You will need to listen to the episode to learn more about her big bet by listening to the episode.

This is a wonderfully insightful disruptive conversation with an entrepreneur who is daring to radically improve Canada’s healthcare system. She is daring to build the tools that contribute to ensuring that people get better care in a short time period. She is working to help citizens can be in control of managing their own health and the own data.

In this conversation, we touch on many things like from informal care to data hording. Hope you enjoy this disruptive conversation with Huda Idrees as she shares her thinking on how she plans to unleashes the latent potential within the healthcare.


You can find Huda at the link below:
http://www.hudaidrees.com/

Links mentioned in the podcast:
Cheryl Rose - http://www.sigeneration.ca/disruptive-conversations/
Elon Musk: https://www.ted.com/talks/elon_musk_the_future_we_re_building_and_boring

John Richardson is a very bold entrepreneur. John is working to disrupt or rethink decision-making. He is building technology, Ethelo, that helps large groups improve the way they make decisions. At the heart of his work, he is asking two key questions:
•How do we improve large group decision making?
•How do we improve governance?

In this episode, John argues that although many of us rightly assume technology will help us address many of the most challenge issues of our time, there is another powerful approach that will also play a role in addressing these complex problems. He argues that many of our problems are decision-making problems. He and is team have built Ethelo to help the world improve the way we make group decisions.

In our conversation, John makes the wonderfully insightful point that many people focus on outcomes rather than the intention which they bring to bear on their work. He makes the case that by focusing on the quality of the effort you bring to bear on the problem you are building your resilience around managing the unanticipated things that will emerge. For him, paying attention to what might happen can really limit your potential.

If John and his team are able to disrupt the way make decision, it could really redefine the kinds of outcomes we see in the world.

Links in the podcast:
http://ethelo.com/

In this episode, Daniel Egger and I discuss how many organization want to disrupt because they have not sufficiently prepared for the future. Daniel is a Human Centered Disruptive Innovation consultant and is the author of the book Future Value Generation: Do you need to create new Business Logics?

Daniel has a slightly different take on how we generate innovation. For him, innovation, foresight and strategy should start from the perspective of human emotions. One of his most interesting arguments, revealed in this episode, is that change comes with opposition, but this despite this opposition, it is also an opportunity.

One of the many insights to take away from that episode is that a human-centred approach means that we need to remember that people values are in a constant state of change. If you are trying to launch a product in a two or three years, we need to pay attention to how consumers values may change while we are building and launching the new product.

Additionally, Daniel argues that humans will always have emotions that transcend age, gender and race. Over time, it is important to focus on people and their perspectives. In taking a human-centered approach to disruption and innovation, it is helpful to focus on all dimensions of clients’ life and the things that influence their emotional states.

Going blindly into the future leaves organizations vulnerable to disruptions rather than being resilient to the changes that are going to come. Daniel has very refreshing perspectives of disruption and innovation that we unpack in this episode of Disruptive Conversations.

For many people who grow up in small towns, it is almost a race to try to get out and move to a big city. For Amanda, her experiences abroad gave her insight into the tremendous potential that New Brunswick had to offer. She is the Director at NouLAB and in this episode, we discuss her audacious goal to redefine New Brunswick. She is working to disrupt the way decisions are made.

She is working to help people see problems form many different perspectives. Quoting Peter Senge, she remind us that we have a tendency to see the system from our perspective. Much of her work is about helping people look at problems form a different perspective. She is working to help a city rethink how the solve problems. As a way of helping people rethink their perspective two powerful questions emerged.

•What is the work that you trying to do?
•What is the work you are doing?

Perhaps my favorite thing about this episode is Amanda’s favorite word Lagom. Lagom is the Swedish word for “just the right amount.” We did not talk about it much in the show, but it is such a powerful concept. Another powerful concept in this episode was Amanda’s favorite quote was by Anne Frank.

“How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.”

In reflecting on this Anne Frank’s quote, we are reminded that there are no magic bullets and that this work is about learning together.

In part two of my conversation with Chuck Marohn we diver deeper into how he and his team are building a movement of one million people who care. We even explore a very interesting concept called temporal discounting, where we highly value things that valuable today, but discount things that are valuable in the future. We are biased to pay attention to things in the short term. The bottom line with the mess that we are today is that we created the mess that we are trying to disrupt.

In the first episode, we talk about how change should come from neighborhood disruptors and not bureaucrats. In this conversation, we dive deeper into how we involve the average citizen in the building the world they want to live in. We do not have create or invent many new things. Many of the solutions to our problems are already in the system, but we are blinded by their desire for what we already know. Henry Ford famously said, “if I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” In this conversation, we build on this by exploring how and why people ask for faster horses. A lot of it, is core to Chucks work. For example, if we slow down traffic, people get to their destinations faster. This counter intuitive notion is part of the faster horse’s metaphor because people’s paradigms and understandings of the world assume that going faster will give us the outcome we desire.

For Chuck and his colleagues, their goal is to work them self out of jobs.

In part one of this very deep conversation with Charles (Chuck) Marohn, we explore his the deep insight has had from is media outlet Strong Town. Strong Town’s mission is to support a model of development that allows America’s cities, towns and neighborhoods to become financially strong and resilient. Strong Towns even has a few principles:
•Strong cities, towns and neighborhoods cannot happen without strong citizens (people who care).
•Local government is a platform for strong citizens to collaboratively build a prosperous place.
•Financial solvency is a prerequisite for long term prosperity.
•Land is the base resource from which community prosperity is built and sustained. It must not be squandered.
•A transportation system is a means of creating prosperity in a community, not an end unto itself.
•Job creation and economic growth are the results of a healthy local economy, not substitutes for on
In this conversation with Chuck we explore his journey in building a movement around the concept of Strong Towns. In this episode, he shares many lessons he has learned along the way and it is full of lots of insight. A few major questions stood out for me:
•How do you become someone who has less answers and more questions?
•How do we acknowledge that everyone has imperfections?
•How do we learn to change shared relationship approach to how we build cities?

One of the telling changes that stood out for me was that there are things we take as normal, that were once considered to be absurd ideas. Chuck describes how the notion that people living in the city would one day live in corn fields that were only accessible by cars, it would have been thought to be a crazy idea. Yet, that is what America has built. We call it the suburbs and there are body of assumptions that make living in the suburb inaccessible for poor people. This is just one example of how we can rethink the way we build villages and cities that work for more people.

Within the rise of the shared economy, there is increasing need for an approach to insurance that meets these emerging ways of working. Tim Attia and his colleagues have built a product for the shared economy. In this episode, we discuss how they built an insurance product from the ground up. One that meets the needs of the new ways people are working. He tells the story of how existing thinking and practices in industry saw insurance in the shared economy as too risky to invest. One practice for example required legislative change, but in another region there was a rule that if there was no other product like it that exists in the market then they can enter that market under special conditions. They used this lightly regulated mode to expand their line of business throughout the United States.

In the second half of the podcast, Tim shares his theory on how you disrupt a sector or system. His theory involves three steps. First disrupt in open field. Instead of competing with incumbents do what others are no willing to do. Second, start with a blank slate. Do not rely on previous ways of doing things to do something different. Reimagine the model to meet the new model you are building. Finally, reimagine the experience of the user to be as simple and seamless as possible