Community Playbooks

Health and Well-Being

Well, the EPA -- by minimally protecting air quality -- has shown once again that having regulatory oversight for a first-approximation level economic system just doesn't work well. 

From the Washington Post article:

The EPA estimated that it will cost polluting industries $7.6 billion to $8.8 billion a year to meet the 75-ppb standard, but that rule will yield $2 billion to $19 billion in health benefits.

So, once again, we have this issue that we are accounting in a way that has no impact on another, so even though we can see the connections -- and by "health benefits" just imagine how much innovation and productivity isn't happening to think about secondary effects -- we have no true "market mechanism" at work here.

When I was in MBA-land, we had a case in Cost Accounting regarding two Division heads having at it as they lobbied for their own interests.  This is the same issue:  the health people want one thing, and the business lobbyists want another thing.  As a society, we have no CEO, no ultimate arbiter of whether we're following the mission of the organization, because as a society, we don't have a single mission.  This is where a "market" ends up being a helpful proxy for "wisdom of the crowds".

The good news is that we're on it, as a society; there are many people developing new ways to manage risk and evaluate sustainability in industry so as to enable us to reward those who "do good."

Underlying "doing good," though, is acting in concert with our own long-term self-interests.  We all know that sometimes we don't sleep enough because there's something else more important (work? sick kid?...).  As a society, sometimes we don't act sustainably because we're caught up in something else (economy? feeling self-protective?). Sometimes, it's the right decision, sometimes it's not.

Version 2.0 of the economy will be to have a global model that can account for all facets of humans' lives, not simply the accumulation of financial currency.

(Note, this post is cross-posted from Solvation.)

Social Cap Asset building in Non-Profits

In her post, PHILANTHROPY 2173: Notes on nonprofit networks, Lucy Bernholz talks about research done at FAS, which summarizes non-profits' networks by saying "it takes all kinds."

It's important to understand how this complexifies the replication process. Building out networks differs based on the missions of the non-profits.

"Superbowl Sunday": What is happiness?

Tara Hunt has written up her thoughts on how happiness, citizenship and governance are related.

Fundamental epiphanies for her came from an 2000-1 APA study:

Attaining popularity or influence and money or luxury is not what makes people the happiest and is at the bottom of the list of psychological needs, according to a new study. Topping the list of needs that appear to bring happiness are autonomy (feeling that your activities are self-chosen and self-endorsed), competence (feeling that you are effective in your activities), relatedness (feeling a sense of closeness with others) and self-esteem.

Undoubtedly the devil's in the details there with "self-esteem," but this can be a contributing component to building a roadmap regarding which attributes should be developed within successful communities.  I'm sure that the proportion of each ingredient would vary on the culture:  some communities would need to feel quite a bit of relatedness and not depend so highly on a sense of autonomy, for example. 

Looking at How Value is created

Long, long ago, I blogged a review of a seminal book in Intangible Asset valuation, called "Intangible Assets," by Baruch Lev.

The upshot of this line of thinking is that in slow-changing (relative to human lifespans) manufacturing-based industry, the production of Things can represent instantiated value and since there's not much volatility in processes and community, current performance is an ok indicator of future performance.  However, in today's world, production doesn't necessarily indicate the ability of the firm (or entity) to create value in the future.

What does?  Physical health, intelligence and knowledge, personality attributes like creativity;  relationships, work processes... things that aren't tangible, or at best are tangible only in the sense that they're documented. (IP is this way: before it's a patent, it still exists; but of course there are no Balance Sheet lines called 'ideas-in-progress'.)

Building and protecting these assets -- social, intellectual, natural (environment and health) -- are fundamental to communities, whether they're the community of a firm, outside a firm, or transcending the boundary.

 

These elements map together as shown above, click to enlarge (first published by IFTF within the 2007 Ten Year Forecast Perspective).

The Community Playbook Process Toolkit

The purpose of the toolkit is to enable the creation of case studies of successful organizations that serve as templates for new organizations in similar circumstances.  Since each community is different not only in its environment but also in the motivations that drive its members, creating “standard operating procedures” with the goal of franchising successful non-profits is far more complex than performing the same exercise with successful for-profits.  Consequently, the process needs to attend to far more than specific, measurable goals if it’s going to be successfully replicable in a variety of slightly to substantively different situations.

The first step in the Community Playbook Process is to establish the multiple asset framework that the organization is operating within currently.  By thoroughly examining the social and knowledge assets, and how they interrelate both within the organization and extending outside into the community, this process will eventually build a detailed picture of the assets at a particular point in time.

The second step is to examine each component and discuss the historical narrative and timeline for the creation of each of the asset bases: how were they built?  What is the relevance to the organization: resource building, risk-management, or some combination?

 

 

The Organizational Ecology
(click to enlarge)

Because social and intellectual capital aren’t numerical, the third step is to create a secondary map that contains a visual depiction of the assets and how they relate.

The total output will be a current snapshot of the assets, a historical narrative about how each asset class was built, and a final “balance sheet” of what the assets are, currently.