Communities

communities of interest and practice

Self-sufficiency or Resilience?

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The NB Self-Sufficiency Task Force is making its recommendations, based on its stated realities of a “need to increase our population and our labour force”, “increase labour productivity by providing people with the right tools for he right jobs”, create “large-scale investments in infrastructure”, and “expand our existing corporate base”. All of this is premised on what appears to be the primary reality, that “Export growth must drive overall economic growth. This will create prosperity”.

The ways to achieve this are provided as 20 policy recommendations, including “Rebranding New Brunswick”, creating a “flexible incentives program to attract businesses” and conduct a “review of business tax policy”. The Task Force also recommends the establishment of several new organisations, including:

  • A Commission on the Future of Local Governments
  • An Aboriginal Employment Council
  • A $1-billion Self-Sufficiency Fund (of which $500 million would be raised from long-term bonds from the Liquor Corporation)
  • A not-for-profit corporation to raise funds necessary to develop an e-health system
  • A centre of excellence for service delivery

In addition, the Task Forces recommends the “creation of a lean manufacturing program by the Research and Productivity Council” and a targeted immigration strategy.

I’m not an economic development specialist but I have worked with several NB companies, government departments and non-profits. I try to see patterns and determine the underlying foundation of operating models, to see what makes them tick.

It appears that the foundation for self-sufficiency is that we need to export our stuff and we need to get bigger companies (corporations) to locate here so that they can sell our stuff. In return we get jobs, and employees will continue to take their cars and drive to these places that generate the paycheques, from which the government will deduct taxes or invest their beer money profits. This money will create some think-tanks and money-lending agencies to fuel this economy.

So what’s new? Corporations create jobs based on shipping stuff that belongs to the people, especially our grandchildren. We get jobs to pay taxes and attract some more people to come and pay taxes. Everything goes along just fine as long as there is demand for our products. The corporations get richer and the average citizen remains a wage-slave. This is self-sufficiency?

In reading the reports, I didn’t see much that was innovative at all. Yes, there’s an understanding that “We need to be prepared for sweeping changes of unprecedented magnitude”, but little that explains how we can be better prepared. For instance, the need for education is stated, but it is assumed that the same outdated industrial structure is adequate for our societal needs. It is assumed that work will continue to be a place to which we commute, increasing the demand for roads. Recommendations for agriculture are to continue the corporatist model, whereas there is real innovative thinking coming from people like Rob Paterson on Food:

This series will be all about how we can practically, and in a generation, shift from a model where farming now profits only a few large external companies, where it creates serfs of our farmers and where it is ruining our biosphere. Shift from this to a model where it is our farmers who make the money and where farming is the most powerful beneficial force that restores and sustains the key services that give us all life on PEI.

This report seems to be a recommendation for business as usual, but under a new brand. It supports the entrenched powers, particularly faceless corporations who are not rooted in the land.

Thomas Homer-Dixon has said that we really need to develop resilience in order to be prepared for an uncertain future. The best tools available for that task are open source collaborative problem-solving and the Internet. The grassroots, who really understand the land and our communities now have the means to assemble and collaborate. It seems that real leadership and vision for our future as a resilient region is up to us.

From Concept to Commons

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BACKGROUND

About five years ago I met Barry and Pam at the Atlantic Wildlife Institute, which is located about 15 KM outside of Sackville on a large property bordering the headwaters of the Tantramar River. At the time, AWI consisted of about a dozen buildings, each designed for a specific type of animal care.

The Institute takes in wildlife in the same way that a researcher would take air or water samples. Each animal tells a story and through hands-on care and possible release, we can learn about the causes of displacement, most of which are due to human actions. However, caring for animals is not enough. What is learned has to be passed on to others, so that the entire community can work to maintain the diversity of species necessary for life. There’s more information on the AWI website. Too often, environmental knowledge gets passed on only to those who are already committed, so AWI also reaches out through programs such as youth at risk. AWI is really about learning.

OUR FIRST MAJOR PROJECT

In order to create a focal point for learning activities, we decided to build a learning centre a few years ago. It would be slightly removed from the wildlife care facilities, so that the animals would not be bothered (AWI is not a zoo). We were able to build the Wildlife Learning Centre, at a cost of almost $400,000 through the support our many partners. This project showed us what we could do by working in collaboration with government, the private sector, academia, and the community.

WLC

The success of this project started several conversations. For example, we knew that with the limited staff that we had, we could not get our message out to everyone. We also wanted to start a network that would help to get science-based practices out to everyone who might come into contact with wildlife, ranging from the general public to veterinarians. For instance, many of the animals that arrive at AWI should never have been disturbed in the first place.

We wanted to build a more public office that would connect with the community and act as a node in the embryonic network. The idea was to create an environmental services centre in Sackville, which was already home to the Canadian Wildlife Service, Bird Studies Canada and other environmental groups. In 2005 we started talking to community groups and interested individuals and from these conversations our idea grew.

Almost every group that we met with had the same issue. They all needed space to do their work or to operate their programs. Few had dedicated buildings and they were constantly looking for low-cost locations. Many were operated out of someone’s house. The problem was that most lacked the consistent funds to pay rent on a long-term basis.

A COMMONS

It was at this time that I became interested in the notion of the “Work Commons” and watched with interest as Rob, Dan, and Cynthia created the Queen Street Commons in Charlottetown. I saw how individuals could purchase memberships for $35 a month and that with sufficient members, a work commons would be financially sustainable. Why not merge the idea of a work commons with an environmental centre, based on some form of cooperative? From this idea we progressed to the concept of three pillars (environmental, cultural, entrepreneurial), reflecting the makeup of our community.

With this concept, we were able to get a business plan funded by our Town Council and generate more support from businesses and organisations. As of today, we are in the process of securing a piece of property thanks to the generosity of Irving Oil.

There is a real need for physical space in our community. Non-profit organisation need a place to work and meet but cannot afford a dedicated space. The Commons will allow several non-profits to share office space. Home-based business need a place to meet with other people, or host meetings. Our Commons will be a place for the community to build; a gathering place for emerging businesses to form partnerships & friendships, and an appealing setting to think and interact with other creative people.

A COMMON POINT FOR STAFFING

I believe that a Commons would be a valuable addition to any community. It would be the place to build our own sense of community, something that has been lacking in many of our industrial age towns and cities. A common venue could also help with that other component that is missing from most non-profits: core funding.

Any non-profit organisation in this country will tell you that funding for administration and overhead is almost impossible to secure. You can get program funding or infrastructure funding but no money for administration or day-to-day operations. However, if you have a Commons, you now have the common physical space to share staff. One person can work for several non-profits. Instead of going after small pockets of funds, non-profits located in a commons can collaborate and seek funding together, because they now have a single physical address.

The path appears to be one of first providing valued programs and services, followed by collaboration and network building. Then you build physical infrastructure so that you can cooperate even more and grow your services. So far, we have been successful on this journey and I look forward to eventually breaking ground. Thanks to everyone who is working to make it happen.

It’s the Model, Stupid

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In recent discussions about building new businesses or community economic development projects I’m beginning to feel that the largest obstacles to effective communication are the outdated models that we use.

Given the dominance of the corporate governance model in business, government and non-profit organisations, it’s no wonder that many of us don’t see any other options.

For instance, last night our local chamber of commerce was briefed on the NB Self-sufficiency Task Force. We heard about the need to create 70,000 jobs and that it’s not a question of big business versus small business, but export versus services. According to the logic, exporting companies bring in wealth while support companies just shift money around inside the province. We need more export companies to be self-sufficient, and we need more large companies to create jobs, and of course we need more people due to our aging demographics (more retired people than younger taxpayers). Framed in this way, it’s hard to argue with this logic.

However, it’s like Marshall McLuhan said, “We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future”. My readings and conversations over the past few years give me cause to question the line of reasoning from the task force and other policy influencers.

For instance, Thomas Homer-Dixon proposes that we build more resilient communities that can take care of themselves when our tightly-coupled global supply chain cracks as the result of some highly probable event such as an oil crisis, an environmental disaster or a pandemic. An export orientation won’t help if global shipping is significantly reduced for six months, but local greenhouses would make us more resilient.

Yochai Benkler shows how the Internet and open source development are enabling the social production of knowledge. According to Nine Shift, creating knowledge is the fastest growing segment of our economy, as manufacturing jobs continue to decrease. Dan Pink sees the rise of a free-agent nation and surmises that creativity is more important for economic success than industrial style productivity. Jon Husband sums up this change, from hierarchy to wirearchy :

Wirearchy – a dynamic flow of power and authority, based on knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results, enabled by interconnected people and technology.

pyramid_bruno_girin

The corporation is a model developed for the industrial age, using command and control systems. It enabled the dominance of the salaried employee as the primary means for most people to generate wealth. However, the Industrial Age will be over in North America and Europe by 2020. All data and trends indicate a rapid decrease in the importance of the manufacturing sector, our primary vehicle of economic development for the past century.

At the same time, we are facing complex challenges to our civilization that cannot be addressed by linear or command and control solutions. Unfortunately, our organisations are ill-equipped to deal with these complex issues. Complex environments are unpredictible, whereas our institutions are based on predictibility. Take for instance government budgets, corporate quarterly growth expectations or educational curricula that are slow to change and assume the same standard for everyone.

Basically, we have the wrong models and inadequate tools to even begin to address our most pressing issues. Our problem is that we cannot even talk about our problems. Reframing the conversation may be our biggest challenge for the short term so that we, as a society, can start to think about the long term.

Value Network Analysis Resources

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We had a very informative session on value networks yesterday in Saint John. The workshop, conducted by Patti Anklam, Hal Richman and Gordon Smith, received positive reviews. Due to the weather we had several last-minute cancellations, but that meant more good food for everyone, as is evident in this photo:

vna-workshop-break.JPG

Therefore, as a follow-up to our workshop, here are several resources to further explore value network analysis and how it can be used in your organisation:

Once again, I’d like to thank our partners, NRC-IRAP and PropelSJ for helping us to put on this workshop.

For me, a key understanding about value network analysis is that it is a process which is more art than science. Humans work in complex environments and we are by our very nature unpredictable. The result of a VNA allows you to ask better questions but it doesn’t give specific answers (it’s not a tool for bean counters). I think that VNA is an excellent change management tool. I can see the use of VNA and the resulting concept maps enabling better communication within organisations, with clients, with funders and throughout communities.

All in all, it was a good learning day for me :-)

Learn About Value Networks

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Fatsia

Photo by Crissxross

As previously announced (follow link for details), there will be a free workshop on Value Networks, on Tuesday, March 20th in Saint John.

The morning session (coffee at 8:30 AM, start at 9:00 AM) is a general overview and open to anyone. The afternoon session is a hands-on workshop focused on small and medium-sized businessses in the ICT sector. Come out and learn something practical to improve your business. In itself, this will be an opportunity to meet some interesting people in an intimate and comfortable environment.

Further reading:

What Is Value Network Analysis Verna Allee (PDF)

KM and the Social Network Patti Anklam (PDF)

Intangibles

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Jay Cross just created a short video discussing the importance of intangible assets. When examining value networks, which we will discussing in our free Value Networks Workshop on March 20th, one looks at tangible and intangible types of value, the latter described by Verna Allee as:

Intangible knowledge exchanges include strategic information, planning knowledge, process knowledge, technical know-how, collaborative design, policy development, etc., which flow around and support the core product and service value chain.

Intangible benefits are advantages or favors that can be offered from one person to another. Examples might be offering to provide political support to someone. Or a research organization might ask someone to volunteer their time and expertise to a project in exchange for an intangible benefit of prestige by affiliation. These are intangible “products” that can be exchanged, as indeed people can and do “trade favors” to build relationships.

The relationship between intangibles and tangibles reminds me of the informal/formal learning continuum. In each case, it seems that the formal/tangible component is easier to measure, so that is where our industrial management methods have concentrated their efforts. As our organisations become inter-networked, and relationships create more of our value, we realise that we have to pay attention to the silent majority that is intangible/informal.

For further reading on value networks, check out Patti Anklam’s blog at Networks, Complexity and Relatedness.

Building Resilience – The Upside of Down

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I’ve just finished reading The Upside of Down, which is very disturbing, but at the same confirms some of my own directions in life. A good part of this book reads like An Inconvenient Truth, but Homer-Dixon adds more detail about how we got into this mess. Much of the book is dedicated to an explanation of the five tectonic stresses that we face as a civilization — population; energy; environmental; climate and economic. About 80% of this book is depressing to any thoughtful or caring person.

However, there is a positive note — in times of crisis and destruction come opportunities for regeneration. This requires a ‘prospective mind’ that can anticipate crises and prepare for them. For instance, Homer-Dixon encourages building resilience into our communities and economies, so that we are not dependent on tightly coupled global supply chains. Resilience implies redundancy and is evident everywhere in nature.

Homer-Dixon suggests two related tools for helping us to build more resilient communities – the Internet and open source collaborative problem-solving. He sees much untapped potential in using one billion interconnected volunteers to bypass elite special interests and tackle our urgent global problems. Connecting with a worldwide community of interest while creating resilient local communities is the general recommendation from Homer-Dixon.

Advance planning means we need to develop a wide range of scenarios and experiment with technologies, organizations, and ideas. We’ll do better at these tasks, and we’ll also do better in the confusing aftermath of breakdown, if we use a decentralized approach to solving our problems, because traditional centralized and top-down approaches are not nimble enough, and they stifle creativity.

Homer-Dixon’s argument and suggestion to address “catastrophe, creativity and the renewal of civilization” is a solid argument for many of the activities that I now find myself engaged in. These range from the creation of our community work Commons; our local organic food purchasing cooperative; and implementing open source organisational models. There is also the search for meaning, beyond that which was developed two millennia ago by the great faiths, during what is described in the book as the Axial Age, when “… people came to understand that they could use reason and reflection to see beyond their immediate reality …”. What we usually experience is more like this:

When we get in the door of our nearest church, mosque or synagogue, we find there’s no real opportunity for discussion. Instead, we’re handed a creed of some kind. We’re told what to think about values, not how to think about them.

The first step in our renewal as a civilization is admitting that we face a global crisis and talking about what we can do.

Energy Efficiency Information Session in Sackville

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Passing on this information I received via e-mail.

EOS Eco-Energy and Efficiency NB are hosting an Energy Efficiency Information Session on 16 March 2007 at 7:00 PM. It will be held at the Sackville Civic Centre and admission is free. The presentation will cover existing homes, new homes and multi-unit residential buildings. To learn more about existing New Brunswick energy programs, go to the Efficiency NB site.

NB Self-sufficiency Task Force

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The New Brunswick government has commissioned a task force to look into ways that this Province can become self-sufficient.

You are invited to view the comments and/or join the discussion. The Task Force Co-chairs also contribute, by posting questions and/or clarifying issues. The contents of this Discussion Forum will be analyzed and contribute to the preparation of Final Report of the Task Force on Self-Sufficiency. The Discussion Forum is open until March 31, 2007.

The recommendations to date could be considered to be a bit controversial and have fostered some discussion and conflicting points of view. I’ve added my comments to a few of the six discussion areas:

  1. Increase population and labour force
  2. Sweeping changes
  3. Increase labour productivity
  4. Rural and Urban connections
  5. Export growth
  6. Expand our existing corporate base
  7. Leaders

Part of my concern about this process is that it is just a snapshot in time and does not connect to the serious discussions that have been going on for several years in non-traditional media (like blogs). If you have some perspective on economic & community development, then please add your comments to the “official” discussion. I’m told that the Premier will read these comments, while I’m sure that most politicians don’t read any of our blogs (correct me if I’m wrong).

So if you have older posts that pertain to these topics, then just copy and paste them in. Think of it as a manually-operated RSS aggregator ;-)