Maybe because I was grouped with the “design” participants, another key learning from Davos was this: Innovate, design, and problem-solve based on the voices and concerns of the people you want to reach and serve. Boundaries are blurring, the divides are increasing (based on perception if not reality). So the road to workable solutions lies with starting with who you want to reach and not bringing a top-down solution to their problems. The world is readier than ever for new approaches that are created from the bottom-up. The high number of designers who were exploring such issues is a testament to how far the world has come. We are learning a lot about the poor. We now need to be more effective in building systems that allow them to make their own decisions and choices.
I couldn’t agree more with the bottom-up grass roots approach. As discussed in your posting about Africa, many poor countries have excellent skills in what they choose to do, whether it is fishing, or other industries. There is definitely opportunity to improve production techniques and management skill, and when coupling that development process with the poors hopes and dreams, participation in an increasing market will follow.
The people I deal with throughout SE Asia are so resilient and focused on what they want to achieve. I have been so touched by the attitudes of families so affected by the Tsunami in Aceh Province. Help them to help themselves.
It seems to me much of the aid is directed too much through a top down approach, getting stuck in sometimes questionable beauracracy, and not reaching the intended targets. I think more of a bottom up approach that builds confidence in the poor through listening to them, and assisting them to achieve their aspirations, which will in turn give them confidence to change [through increasing weight of numbers] problems at the top level.
Reply to Brad JacksonAcumen Fund Launches Blog…
We’ve talked about Acumen Fund before here at NextBillion - the non-profit venture fund that supports BOP enterprises delivering critical goods and services to the world’s low-income communities through investments. Like us, they too believe in us…
Achieving a more bottom-up approach will require everybody to consider the bases of how we think, organise and govern our organisations now.
Governance is the process by which government, business and civil society organisations gain, exercise and maintain power in relation to individual end-users/citizens and their physical, social and cultural environments. Modern means of transparent communication are making present governance approaches obsolete. Since the Industrial Revolution, organisations have developed top-down, hierarchical, command and control governance arrangements in a climate of slow, uncertain, incomplete and often secretive communications to meet mass markets of relatively uninformed individual end-users/citizens in independent nation states. These governance arrangements are dominated by managers so the situation is sometimes referred to as the managerial economy.
Bullying, corruption, poor accountability, poor acceptance of responsibility in organisations, poor stakeholder engagement and lack of transparency are possible in this sort of economy and are tolerated as being competitive ways of gaining, exercising and maintaining power over people and their physical, social and cultural environments. The cooperative and creative potential of most human beings is seen as inferior to the ultra-competitive nature of some people.
More generally, because of the influence of these top-down organisations over our lives, value and wealth generation are regarded as residing in the products and services supplied by them rather than in the end-users/citizens who generate demand and can now readily express it. This has inhibited sustainable improvement in the lives of many because it has valued production and distribution (supply) at the expense of physical, social and cultural environments and the potential for cooperation and creativity in each individual.
This is no longer the most efficient, effective and competitive way to organise because supply responses from such organisations cannot keep pace with the demand changes of a rapidly increasing number of informed end-users/citizens with access to world-wide, comprehensive and fast communications. End-users/citizens, for whom the organisations exist, have become alienated from the organisations. It is time for existing business, government and civil society organisations to change and for new enterprises to adopt a governance approach tailored to the realities of an emerging distributed economy.
Such a governance approach is now possible.
Reply to Graham Douglas