Inspiration
Conception Comes Before Birth
A nine month journey will begin shortly. It will be uncertain, full of expectation, and at the end of which there will be the emerging of something which at the time of writing this post was only a glimmer in my eye.
It is a journey that starts with an intimate partnership of sorts. That part, the union with others, is unavoidable. It will be messy, fun, maybe full of passion. But for the nine month journey to be successful at the conclusion, at the beginning something must be created.
During this process, a new entity will be woven together, in a process that creates new life. It is an astounding feat, many would describe as a miracle.
Yes, we are birthing an idea. And I want you to be more than just a casual observer. Coyly, I’m asking you to help conceive this with me. Would you….?
Perhaps this description is comical, and maybe more dramatic than is needed. Commencing next week is the beginning of a nine month epic journey called the Design Forum where we will address a question asking “how might we use our networks to improve the delivery of child survival?”
I was describing the vision for the Design Forum that would follow the epic journey that was the 10 City Bridge Run on the eve of the final leg in New York to my good friend Kelley when she identified that it was a journey of nine months. She questioned whether gender played a role in how the Design Forum unfolded. It was a good question: guys and girls think differently. We bring different life experience to the table. Biologically there are core differences which shape our function.
This doesn’t mean that we have ‘male’ roles and ‘female’ roles. That would be too limiting and prescriptive. What it does do though is open the process of the Design Forum to be seen as taking place across loosely the equivalent amount of time that it takes for human pregnancy.
Together, we really are engaging on the process of an idea. Actually, many ideas. And the metaphor extends beyond that further. This endeavour is about enabling life, not so much creating life, but preventing death in order to sustain a flourishing existence. This is important beyond the reasons that would appear obvious. Reducing child mortality is counter-intuitively the best way to contribute to the ending of extreme poverty, and by doing so to improve quality of life, improve health and infrastructure, and these things lead to opportunities for education where currently there are few, and ultimately contain population growth.
Improving child survival is too often the punch line of a funding appeal from an institutional aid agency, but what does it actually involve? There are few silver bullets, and it will involve a lot of hard work. But one thing we can know for sure: it all begins with the birth of an idea sewn from our imaginations.
Design Forum: what is it, and why does it matter?
I’m on an epic journey. It is a quest. But it is not about me. It is about us. Together.
This is about you, not me.
Only you can say that we are on this journey together. It is your decision, not mine. I’ll write more about what that journey is shortly, but first let me explain why the decision you make is important.
This is a quest.
This is a quest to make a difference. Quests come in all shapes and sizes. This one is to improve the delivery of child survival.
This is about child survival.
So let’s begin there. I have loosely defined child survival as enabling children to flourish past their fifth birthday. Not just live, because I don’t think that is enough, even though we seldom stop to think twice about the opportunities that life brings us. If you are reading this, you really are one of the fortunate on this one earth we all enjoy. You can read which means you have had the privilege of education, and you have access to a computer, which means you have access to electricity. If you have access to education, technology (a computer), and infrastructure (electricity), it probably suggests you enjoy a wide range of other benefits that a majority of the human race can only dream about. Yes really, everyone else is not just like you. You are special.
This is about building bridges.
My good mate Scott O’Brien has an idea he is working on to connect the top billion with the bottom billion on the planet. It is the ultimate bold endeavour in building bridges. There has been a lot of interplay in the ideas he and I share. And I really enjoy the challenge and inspiration that comes from hearing near ideas or having my old ideas questioned. That is how we find new horizons. It is how we make progress collectively, and it is how we grow individually.
This is about philanthropy.
My question to you is what will you do with the privileged status you have inherited. Yes, there may well be every reason to complain: job security, relationship issues, too little money, health is not where it should be, stressed to the max, and maybe even your latte arrived cold. Those are real issues. Even the latte. But compared with others, you are fortunate and special. Philanthropy is described as having a concern for human welfare, and mostly this definition is associated with giving away money. But here I want to challenge that definition. What about if we consider other resources we enjoy that we can draw upon to use to good effect to benefit human welfare? True philanthropy. Using your time, your talents, your networks, your imagination. Connecting with others so as to help address someone else’s problem in the interest of their welfare is a selfless act of generosity. It is also shown to be the best, fastest, and most reliable way to obtain a sustainable state of happiness. That is, happiness comes from working toward the betterment of others. And don’t worry, the way the world work, these things come back you you in spades. To paraphrase Churchill: “it is by giving that we get.”
This is about making a difference.
UNICEF calculate that every day more than 16,000 children under the age of five die. That figure is called child mortality. Most of those deaths occur within the first 24 hours of life. Many of these deaths are preventable. So why don’t we just prevent them? Can it be that hard? Bill and Melinda Gates have used their recent Annual Letter as a stunt to bet that this figure will fall below 8,000 in the next 15 years. That is good news and would represent the fastest rate of benefit to humanity in history. But this won’t just happen on its own. Yes, significant progress has been made across the last 10 years especially, but let’s not leave change to chance. Innovation comes about through intervention. We need to act to bring about this difference. Returning to the point about philanthropy, this is about more than just giving money. Some of us don’t have money to give. The most valuable contribution any of us can make is through the collective genius of our shared imaginations. Are you going to hold back on us?
This is about us.
This is getting to the part that I said I would come back to. This is where you need to make a decision. I am no longer on this journey alone. Together, a larger community has formed, and we are now ‘us’. The question is, are you coming with us on this journey. Many reading this post know they are. It is easy to get involved if you haven’t done so already. You just have to make a decision to join us, to make a difference together.
This is about a journey.
This is about the 10 City Bridge Run. An idea hatched by myself in 2010 to run 10 sub-marathons each of 24 km in 10 cities across 10 countries as a stunt to address an important question asking: “how might we use our networks to improve the delivery of child survival?” It took a while to commence this journey, and it was far from easy. I began running in Port Moresby on 16 September last year and concluded the running late on a dark, wet and cold night in New York on 3 January this year. But the running was merely the device to get us to the beginning of this epic journey. This journey is actually marked by a series of Design Forums that will be held in all of the 10 cities where running took place as a way of addressing this question about improving the delivery of child survival. You can join at any time. You don’t need to come with us every step of the way. That is the advantage of the ‘us’. We share the labour. We call all reach the destination, and no matter the effort you could contribute, we can all say with much satisfaction “we did this together!”
This is about Design.
We are going to use a method called Design Thinking to address this question about improving child survival. Come as you are, you don’t need special qualifications. We will draw upon the wisdom of the crowd for knowledge. We need your imagination to help us in the process of designing a better future for many.
What does this look like? Read the posts which follows (and a link will be added shortly), to talk about what is involved. There is no cost. You don’t need to travel. You can do it within whatever constraints you currently have. But first you need to decide. You can watch and observe, but why not participate?
We need you to bring whatever magic that makes you special to the table. You are more than enough just as you are. Let’s see what alchemy we can create when we literally put our minds together.
Please join us on this epic quest as we prepare to embark on the Design Forum so at the end of the journey we can all look back with satisfaction at what we have achieved and say: “we did this together!”
Playing For Change
What’s holding us back from taking action? With so much accessibility to each other now through technology, there has never been a better time for opening a conversation that can literally cross borders.
We speak different languages, separated to some degree by cultural differences, live in different time zones, and are distributed in different places often separated by expansive oceans.
Marvin Gaye was right:
“Don’t you know that
There ain’t no mountain high enough
Ain’t no valley low enough
Ain’t no river wide enough
To keep me from getting to you”
We’re starting a conversation through the Design Forum beginning in Osaka. No matter where you are, you are invited. It is free, and so is the Introduction to Design Thinking provided by Acumen Fund/IDEO which we are piggybacking on top of to help frame the conversation ahead. Get involved here.
Watch this video of ‘Playing for Change’ where musicians come together. It is an inspiration for how we can connect despite the seemingly impassible barriers between us.
Good News For A Change
Did you see what I did there? The heading is a pun! It can be read in two ways.
I would like to take credit for such cleverness, but that is actually the title of a book by David Suzuki and Holly Dressel. The full title is “Good News For A Change: how everyday people are helping the planet.”
It is a good book. I bought it from a bookstore which I found to be oasis in a desert of ideas when I was deployed on a temporary posting assignment to Darwin during my service as an Australian Army Officer. I was engaged in border protection duties, and we successfully repatriated a so-called ‘Suspected Illegal Entry Vessel (SIEV14)’ from Australian waters back into international waters from where it then travelled back to its original port in Indonesia.
It was during a difficult time in my life for other reasons of a personal nature, and while many people might want to point the bone for my role in the government’s machinary of ‘stopping the boats’, I think that chapter of my life just goes to show the messiness of defining clean ethical boundaries inside of which we might like our lives to operate.
Just before I departed on the 10 City Bridge Run in late September last year, I posted a video on Facebook to some of my old army buddies which had been recorded by IS (the so-called Islamic State). The video showed the effect of a recoilless rifle exploding when the projectile detonated in the barrel. A recoilless rifle looks like a large tank barrel, basically because that is what it is. As an artillery officer, weapon effects and projectiles was a daily part of my life when I was in the Army. A premature detonation was an extremely rare event, and so on a professional level I shared the video. The video was pretty graphic, in that it didn’t leave much to the imagination of what might have come from the operator of the weapon.
What I didn’t count on was a friend trolling through the video and determining that from his perspective it was inappropriate content. And he made sure that was well known before defriending, and since then has never been heard from again.
So why go to the trouble of writing this story. Or talking about my role in the downfall of people who had their hopes set on settling in Australia (yes, an oblique reference there to Spike Milligan, staying with the military theme for a minute). How can that be good news? How that that bring about positive change?
Well, they aren’t and they don’t. They just are. The world can be a messy place. A lot of things happen that disgust us. This is not what we signed up for!
My point in this post is that we can decide to only see the good news. It is a pollyanaish approach to not seeing the bad. I think that is less than helpful actually, even though it fuels us with goodness and possibility.
To solve a problem, we really do need good news for a change. We need the good news both to make a change, and as a break from the relentless misery of bad news reported through the unforgiving 24 hour news cycle. But let’s also take a minute to appreciate the bad and how it created an obscene situation that at worst might be described as an abomination. We don’t need to forgive or embrace the bad. We just need to know where the rot started so that we can change for good.
An Entry Somewhere Else
The Wharf Theatre on Sydney’s Hickson Road has a quote from Tom Stoppard writ large facing the audience as you exit the building via the front steps:
Every exit is an entry somewhere else.
The quote can be read as a message of optimism and hope. But it also shows the unrelenting cycle of beginnings and endings that make up our lives.
Some of these beginnings and endings are profound. Most are just ordinary. Profound or ordinary, they all matter.
I have been feeling a little overwhelmed at the task ahead of the Design Forum to follow. Not so much overwhelmed by the task, because this has been on my mind for some time now, and so I am very much looking forward to getting amongst it. So why overwhelmed?
Overwhelmed because of the impossible task that once again stands before us. Impossible because from where I am now looking into the future, the Design Forum is an impossible proposition because it requires a level of funding I don’t yet have, impossible because the scale of impact is vastly beyond my own capacity or reach, and impossible because the culmination of the series of the Design Forum will be a significantly stronger force than its humble beginnings in Osaka early in February.
Have you been there before? Asking ‘who am I really to be doing something like this?’ I am well aware of my own limitations, maybe more so after the 10 City Bridge Run where I ran a running stunt involving 10 sub-marathons each of 24 km in 10 cities across 10 countries as an epic quest to open a conversation asking “how might we use our networks to improve the delivery of child survival?”
Let’s reframe that question: given that I have the ability to do this through having conceived the idea no matter the difficulties that will be found ahead, who am I not to embark on the next leg of the journey?
Them words is fighting words.
But neither is this quest one of the heroic leader as a lone actor, an agent for the voice of the many. This is a quest for a collective. It is the heroes journey which calls on the agency of many heroes. And it is an invitation to everyone who wants to take the next steps together with me, with us.
I served in the Australian Army for many years. One experience which remains indelibly imprinted in my mind and psyche from my service was that of deploying together, either on operations or on exercise, as a unified force. The invitation is there to you now: will you fight along side me? Not everyone involved in a combat force carries a rifle and bayonet. The force is capable, diverse, and tight-knit.
What is your part in this quest of the Design Forum? Do you have a part? Maybe you don’t. But maybe you do, and if you do will you rise to the challenge of taking part in even a small way in the series of Design Forum that follows so that together we can make an impact on child survival?
The heroes journey is not for everyone. Many will turn away and stay in the comfort of The Ordinary World. I can’t make the decision for you. I can only extend the invitation.
Ahead, is a exit from The Ordinary World. An entry somewhere else. And you are invited.
Cometh the hour, Cometh the man.
I Began Questioning
Where does your journey begin for making a difference that matters? We all have the same amount of time, and each are gifted in some ways, some more gifted than others. I’m interested in this question of when and why people chose to make a difference, rather than how much of a difference they might have made which is a very subjective measure of contribution.
I was delighted to meet up with an old friend Cynthia Smith in New York the previous week at the conclusion of my epic running stunt where I ran 10 sub-marathons each of 24 km in 10 cities across 10 countries. Many of you know already that the running was a stunt to thread a common narrative through 10 cities where an important question will be explored through a nine month period this year in a series of Design Forums asking: “how might we use our networks to improve the delivery of child survival?”
Cynthia is a curator of design at the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum in New York, located on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in what was once Andrew Carnegie’s home.
Cynthia Smith is a remarkable lady who has led a movement examining ‘design for the other 90%’. The idea is that most design is made for that 10% of the global population that can afford to live in homes, drive cars, enjoy discretionary entertainment, and then still have money left over for fashion, holidays, pets, and everything else that we seldom stop to think twice about.
There is a quote in a book she curated which I read once and carry with me as an inspiration. The quote talks about a decision to make a difference, rather than worrying about how ready we are to make that difference. She wrote:
“As a result, I began questioning: ‘In what ways could I, as a designer, make a difference?’
We met for breakfast, and afterwards spent some time at the collection at the Cooper Hewitt. After saying farewell, I spent some time wandering around the collection myself. What impressed me most was the idea of accessibility of being a designer. One exhibition was about Human Centred Design, and was essentially a call to action for everyone who walked into the exhibition in the old library of Andrew Carnegie to become a designer.
So what does this mean for you and I? Are we any different to Cynthia? After all, she is a ‘capital D’ Designer. You know, a real one.
I think what it means is that you need to read her quote above and own it for yourself. Take ownership of becoming a designer. And start by asking ‘will you decide to make a difference?’
If is not a new thought to you already, then there is one thing I want you to do for me. Share this post with someone who is ‘just ordinary’, but let them know they are far from ordinary. We need them as designers to make a difference. Maybe not in a big way, but with some sense of conviction that they can actually make a difference.
The centrepiece exhibition was about tools, and was thought-provoking. It took the ordinary and showed how everything has in some way been designed.
I like this thought because it comes back to the Design Forums I spoke about earlier in this post. In every city, we will have a particular focus. When we arrive in New York which I believe will be in May, I would like to pick up this theme of tools as it relates to child survival. It is a conversation I want to pick up with Cynthia, and in some ways I am opening up that thought with this post.
In a stroke of serendipity when we were walking to the Cooper Hewitt, we passed the church that is adjacent to the museum. Apparently, Carnegie’s wife gifted the land to the church knowing that the highrises of the city were starting to be build closer and closer to her house. It was an ingenious was to create a buffer to allow her garden to receive sunlight. That the church doesn’t have steeples confirms this story.
I visited the church the Sunday after we met as was totally inspired by the vision of the Minister who had created a real culture of questioning in what ways could the church make a difference to the local community. So my intention is to speak both with Cynthia and the membership at the church to ask, together in what ways could we make a difference?
But the person who I most want to engage in this conversation is you. In what ways as a designer could you make a difference?
Your Turn
Seth Godin is at it again. Another book is very soon to be released to challenge, inspire and reframe the how-we-do-things-around-here in our day to day lives. The “How we do things” when the we is a singular ‘I’.
Seth talks about his idea http://www.yourturn.link. The book’s title is: “What To Do When It’s Your Turn (and it’s always your turn)”. Like a lot of stuff Seth does, it is about shipping.
Seth’s colleague Winnie has put the YourTurnChallenge out there by inviting anyone to join in by writing one blog a day from 19 January on the theme of Your Turn. Read more and see her video here where the submission instructions can also be found. You don’t need your own blog! How easy is that!
This is what will be covered across the seven days:
Day 1: Why are you doing the Your Turn Challenge?
Day 2: Tell us about something that’s important to you.
Day 3: Tell us about something that you think should be improved.
Day 4: Teach us something that you do well.
Day 5: What advice would you give for getting unstuck?
Day 6: Tell us about a time when you surprised yourself.
Day 7: What are you taking with you from this Challenge?
I think this is an important challenge because it helps us (individually) to move past being unstuck which is mostly associated with one form of fear or another. It is also important from the perspective of the Design Forum because at is a process which involves all of us. It is not a spectator sport. It is not a massive plenary. The Design Forum all of us rising to the challenge of engaging with the right questions to find answers that will address how to improve the delivery of child survival.
You can blog about anything you want to, but could I suggest you help opening this conversation about the Design Forum. You don’t need to have the answers. You just need to ship.
Here are the rules:
- Blog every day for 7 days.
- You can write on any topic as long as you share a perspective. We’ll also have different prompts each day to spur your creativity.
- Optional: share your posts on Facebook or Twitter and tag it #YourTurnChallenge. Your friends and family will know if you skipped a day….
Whether you do or don’t, I am going to, but I hope you do too!
Defeat
There were many times since first conceiving this endeavour I have called the 10 City Bridge Run that I realised that what I had proposed was a little too close to the impossible, and that perhaps it might just be out of my reach.
Even since beginning this journey in Port Moresby back in September, I took the first steps with much apprehension as the way forwards was far from clear. It has been a tough journey.
And I am reminded of a great passage from a great general in his classic book, Defeat Into Victory, written by Field Marshall Sir William Slim. The passage speaks for itself:
“The only test of generalship is success, and I had succeeded in nothing I had attempted…The soldier may comfort himself with the thought that, whatever the result, he has done his duty faithfully and steadfastly, but the commander has failed in his duty if he has not won victory, for that is his duty. He has no other comparable to it. He will go over in his mind the events of the campaign. ‘Here, he will think, ‘I went wrong; here I took council of my fears when I should have been bold; there I should have waited to gather strength, not struck piecemeal; at such a moment I failed to grasp opportunity when it was presented to me.’ He will remember the soldiers whom he sent into attack that failed and who did not come back. He will recall the look in the eyes of men who trusted him. ‘I have failed them,’ he will say to himself, ‘and failed my country!’ He will see himself for what he is, a defeated general. In a dark hour, he will turn in upon himself and question the very foundations of his leadership and his manhood.
And then he must stop! For, if he is ever to command in battle again, he must shake off these regrets, and stamp on them, as they claw at his will and self confidence. He must beat off these attacks he delivers against himself, and cast out the doubts born of failure. Forget them, and remember only the lessons to be learnt from defeat, they are than from victory.”
The lessons from the 10 City Bridge Run have been many, and I am in the process of documenting them the best I can now to share more widely. I learnt most from when it was toughest, when there was no obvious way through the many barriers that lay across my path. It wasn’t only my capacity for preserving that brought me through, but it was because of the support of people like you that it was made possible.
Now I am turning my attention to the Design Forum, and it is taking shape. It is not at all what I expected it might be, but better, and I would hope will be more inspiring than what you might have considered as well. This process of the Design Forum is the real epic quest of this journey, and a journey that we must take together. The next steps forward are a team effort.
There has been plenty of failure to get us to this point, but that has been embraced by me. It was an essential part of the journey. The good think is it has given rise to success which we can all enjoy, but not without some hard work.
Starting Small
I have been writing to a friend in Osaka about the apprehension I harbour in beginning the first Design Forum next month.
She gave me some advice to persevere and not to worry, but just to begin with these words:
Starting small is the most important thing. No matter how small, it’s a start.
The Design Forum have become the second phase of an epic quest, and themselves mark the real work the comes from the effort expended in running the 10 sub-marathons each of 24 km in 10 cities across 10 countries as a stunt to open the conversation which is framed for the Design Forum. The conversation asks an important question: “how might we use our networks to improve the delivery of child survival?”
I was explaining to my friend the metaphorical deep breath that I am taking ahead of commencing this next phase of the journey.
Running was hard work. There were too many problems and challenges to recall without flinching. But it was worthwhile. And it was in some respects easier because it was just me running, and because of resource constraints not a team of people running. If there had been a team running, the journey would have been different. If the journey was well-funded from the start, it would have been different. Not only was it what it was, but I contend that it took on its own life in the way that Joseph Campbell describes the narrative of an epic quest being guided in his writing about the Hero’s Journey.
The Design Forum presents a different challenge, and I think harder work.
Even though the journey has began already, this new journey of the Design Forum has just begun. And the first Design Forum might be small.
I don’t know how large the first Design Forum in Osaka will be. Probably small. And I fell a little embarrassed about that. Why do I feel embarrassed, I ask myself? I think it because of the useless action of comparing our own work against the juggernaut of how big this conversation is as presented by many of the institutions are in the world. As a side note, over the last four years I did speak with plenty of these groups to somehow partner or work together in this pursuit, but mostly drew polite responses of rejection largely associated with their fundraising and messaging objectives.
The words of an old American Army Special Forces buddy are ringing in my mind when I think about the advice from my friend in Osaka. He was doing some post-graduate study in management when we met many years ago, and later taught me a memorable small saying his professor taught him: “SS – TS -DV -SF“. And so I will!
Start Small. Think Strategically. Deliver Value. Scale Fast.
There is not a moment to waste! As Campbell would no doubt say: Follow your bliss!
Strove
I friend reminded me of the humourous epitaph written by Walter Savage Landor on the weekend:
I strove with none, for none was worth my strife.
- Nature I loved, and, next to nature, Art;
I warm’d both hands before the fire of Life;
-
It sinks, and I am ready to depart.
Strove is the past tense of to strive which means “to make great efforts to achieve or obtain something”.
Hard work and the ability to persevere are their own reward quite often. After completing the first phase of the 10 City Bridge Run, having run an impossible journey around the world. I can say that I strove.
The Design Forum which mark the next phase in this epic quest are an opportunity for us to strive together.
Landor was most likely being idiosyncratically facetious with his short poem, and without getting lost in borrowing from the meaning of the poem, I can say that I want to strive with all of you, as the issue we are contending for is well worth our strife: improving the delivery of child survival.
Last week, I stumbled across a graffiti scrawled outside one of the many Chinese markets on Mott Street in New York. I don’t know if the author intentionally departed from Landor, but I think his inspiration is one we can share in together moving forward. You can see it at the photo on this page, and it reads:
Warm your hands with the invisible fire of hope!!!
So, please join me. Let us strive together, so that we can look back and say that we strove for something worth our strife.
Building Bridges 