Doing Digital / Hacking Democracy

It's time that Technology started to significantly change the world for good.

Happy 2022! Despite my best efforts, the newsletter didn’t go out over the last weeks of December. Any time that I wasn’t consuming my body weight of street food, was spent in editing my book for submission. Welcome back, and here’s to a year of being well.

Photo by Giu Vicente on Unsplash

Doing Digital

This is the time of the year when it is tradition to produce a list of predictions and reviews. I on the other hand have been clawing my way through the last touches to a book that I committed to deliver by the end of the year. One of the harsh lessons I learnt in the process was this: books about the past are safer, because the past doesn't change. Books about the future are also safe if you're projecting far enough forward. Books about the present are fraught with the risk of being wrong. My book on digital is proving to be such a book about the present, which keeps evolving even as I write it. It's the editorial equivalent of herding an entire species of cats.

The book has 2 key premises. The first is my working definition of digital:

Emerging Tech + User Centric Experiences + Data Driven Decisions = Resilient and Competitive Organisations.

Emerging tech spans everything from Blockchain to Neural Interfaces. User centric interfaces is all about design thinking. Data driven decisions is about getting the right data to the right place, at the right time so that every decision we make can be based on data. Doing all of these right allows business to be cheaper, faster, and better. The book is aimed at explaining all of this to a non-technical 'business person'.

The second premise of the book is that digital initiatives follow a cycle of Connect, Quantify, Optimise. You connect through emerging technology interfaces - from IOT, to voice, to the World Wide Web via browsers. You quantify via all the data that this generates, if your 'connect' layer is successful. And you optimise by re-shaping certain aspects of your business, using AI, Automation or other means. Optimisation is the holy grail, and smart companies think about what they can do differently, not just better.

This cycle of CQO (Connect, Quantify, Optimise) can be applied to a single use case, a function, a job, a home, a car, or even a city. The CQO model is a useful framework for somebody looking to do digital projects within their function, for a new product, or for the whole company. The obvious example of this is Uber - the value of Connect is that you and the driver can find each other without having be physically at the same point in space and time. The value of quantify, is that Uber can advise drivers on where the maximum passengers are by hour and day of the week across a city or a region. And the optimisation in the Uber model is surge pricing. The ability to move to a market clearing price in the face of excess demand.  Price and economic models aren't the only way to optimise. You can reconfigure resources to improve throughput, or completely re-design services for much higher customer satisfaction, or even launch new products. The folks from CityMapper launched a pop-up bus service in conjunction with TFL a few years ago because their data showed that a particular part of London was under-served by existing public transport. You can also optimise through network models - using network native technologies such as blockchain. The CQO model can be applied to healthcare, smart cities and homes, education, banking and payments, or any other business.

There you go. Now you don't have to read the book.  But if you did, an early and imperfect version is available at Lean Pub. An updated version should see light of day later this year, courtesy the Business Express Press, who are based in the US.

2022 And All That

As each year goes by, I feel more and more that the role of technology in actually improving the lives of maximum number of people across the world is paramount. This manifests in a few key areas - Healthcare, Governance, Inequality, Education, and Sustainability. The 5 great problems of our times. It would take too long for me to work through all of these in one newsletter, but you may see me returning to these themes frequently through the year. For this week, I invite you to just think about the challenges to democracy.

Hacking Democracy

I don't know if you've noticed, but increasingly, it has been the case that across the world we elect people who are good at campaigning, rather than those who are good at governing. This is hardly surprising as campaigning has become a science by itself, and delinked from the actually governance capabilities. Or to put it in another way, we are being gamed. This is not a rant about any particular shade of politics. This is a problem with the system.

When I was in business school, we used to have 'black books' - these were just collected and solved papers from previous years, by subject and topic. If you were struggling with linear programming, or interpreting balance sheets, you just studied all the black book examples, and usually did well enough in the exams. Obviously this worked better in subjects where the tests didn't change from year to year. You've seen this phenomenon across the world - test taking techniques trump subject matter expertise. Over time any system can be beaten, unless it's regularly refreshed.

Democracy as we practice it around the world is over 200 years old. With Britain, France, and the US all having established democratic governments by the turn of the 18th century or shortly thereafter. Relative to the changes in the world, how much has the democratic system changed in that time?

For example consider a simple question. How did we determine that 4 or 5 years was the optimum term for a democratically elected government? You would think this is connected to the understanding of how long an elected candidate takes to create impact, or it's in synch with a typical economic cycle, or it's balanced against the cost of conducting this elaborate and messy exercise of elections. If 5 years was optimal 200 years ago, how could it still be the right term size, given everything else that's changed? For example, you would think that the actual cost of casting ballots and counting votes has dropped significantly. The cost of 1 GB of data storage has gone from $193,000 in 1985, to $0.03 in 2020.

And yet, in the same time, campaign spending grew 555%. As you can see in the picture below, from this Time Magazine article.

Another piece of research done by Represent Us, presented by Jennifer Lawrence, suggests that the cost of campaigns means that an elected senator in the US needs to raise $45,000 per day of office on average, in order to be able to stand for re-election. And since only 0.05% of people donate more than $10,000 to political parties, the focus for most elected representatives are the concerns of those 0.05%. See this video.

An excellent example of how systems can be beaten over time is the US process of gerrymandering - which as you know is all about redrawing electoral lines for mutual advantage. It turns out according to the same video above, that 86% of electorates are not competitive, thanks to gerrymandering.

What happens if we don't change? Well in the world of business, you would be treading the well worn path forged by Blockbuster and co. towards irrelevance. But in the case of democracy, it leads to creeping erosion of democratic values and principles, as elected leaders extend their powers steadily by neutering the checks and balances built into the system, and grow increasingly autocratic. We all know that this is happening across the world. But a stark reminder comes from this Economist piece which highlights this trend happening across much of south and south-east Asia.

What can be done? In the simplest of terms, changing the 'exam questions' just enough so that people can't win simply by gaming the last years rules is a good start. What if we implemented a reverse gerrymandering process and changed electoral lines randomly by 10% every election? (Sure, it would disadvantage the incumbents) What if every voter had two votes? What if we engaged citizens in policy making much more rigorously with the technology and information access available today? Audrey Tang from Taiwan, for example, has been doing just that for a decade - using 'Digital Democracy' as a platform. Other innovations such as quadratic voting, as demonstrated by the Economist could also be used for polling citizens on issues. As with any innovation model - we need to conduct experiments and see what works. Unfortunately the impact of mistakes on a voting process is too severe, much like trial and error heart surgery.

But change is both possible and desirable. Just think of test cricket - once the preserve of slow moving days and steeped in tradition. Then along came one-day, and 20-20 cricket, and now we have test cricket that is played day-night, with pink balls, and jersey numbers, and the games have become far more lively and athletically hyper-charged as well. And all 3 formats co-exist and are doing well. And yet, one-day cricket, when introduced by Kerry Packer, the Australian media tycoon, was considered so harmful to cricket that anybody who played in Packer's multi-coloured 'World Series' version was banned from playing test cricket.

All we need therefore is a Kerry Packer for democracy. Is that too much to ask for, 2022?

Reading This week

Indian Tech CEOs: Why are Indian CEO’s on the ascendancy in Silicon Valley? According to this piece, it’s a combination of a gladiatorial education system (been there, done that, love the phrase!), a grounding on how to thrive in a chaotic environment, and of course that those who make it to the US tend to come from the best universities in India and are already the distilled elite of the Indian education system. (BBC)

Indian CEO Data: Does Caste Play a Role? According to the Economist, the Indian CEO in the US is likely to be an upper cast ‘Brahmin’ while the CEO of an Indian company is more likely to be from a trading ‘Baniya’ caste.

Healthcare: Start-ups focusing on life extension - from engineering, to genetics, to age-is-just-a-disease mindsets. Here’s a run through. (TechCrunch)

Blockchain: Walmart uses blockchain in Canada to sort out supply chain complexities. Moving perishables across borders, timezones, and providers while managing hundreds of data points for each. You can understand why blockchain makes sense for a single version of the truth. (HBR)

Sustainability: Measuring climate change (methane) more accurately. The story of Boreas, the advanced spectrometer at the UK’s National Physical Laboratory. Also, find out what exactly a metrologist does. (Wired)

Sustainability: SWOT (Surface Water & Ocean Topography) is a new satellite which will continuously monitor the worlds fresh water systems. Expect this to become a centre of attention in the coming years. (MIT Technology Review)

Autonomous Vehicles: John Deere’s autonomous tractors - is this the pre-cursor to the ‘tractor as a service’ model, given the cost and complexity of these autonomous tractors? (Wired)

Mobility: Sony enters the EV Market, but some believe this is just a trojan horse to demonstrate its high end auto-electronics which it ultimately wants to sell to other car-makers. (FT)

Food for Thought: Ben Evans has 10 questions for 2022, which are worth reflecting on. (Ben Evans)

2022 Predictions: My colleague Frank Diana, himself a futurist, has created a meta-post rounding up a number of prediction pieces, in addition to his own signals for 2022 piece earlier. (Frank Diana)

See you next week.