Starfish: A Community of Resilience...

When is the last time you were in an environment where trust was implicit?  A place where the people you were working along side, shared a unity of purpose and a single mission.

Once you experience this, it is forever engraved in your mind and felt deep in your soul.  A “Starfish Community”, walking together with such a high degree of mutual trust, it will endure and remain resilient against all "Operational Risks" that may be encountered.

Enabled by the wisdom and thinking from Rod Beckstrom and Ori Brafman's book "Starfish and the Spider:  The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations, https://a.co/d/02sW1By3 the "Starfish Community" is growing rapidly across the globe.

A group of decentralized networks that are able to work without hesitancy and with moral courage.  It does not matter if the model is used on the battlefield or in business, the desired outcomes are the same.

The ability for the Starfish Community to evolve, adapt and to consistently execute against its agreed upon mission manifests itself in terrorist acts and simultaneously in humanitarian and disaster response.

The ability for the human race to at one moment be so evil and at the same moment so forgiving and good, will continue to amaze us all.

The business world evolves around us with mergers and acquisitions, incidents of fraud and corruption while a silent and clandestine army of cyber warriors wage conflict on our critical infrastructure and copy or steal our intellectual assets.

The ability for the "Starfish Community" to survive in the virtual environment of the AI Internet is no different than the cities who have encountered natural disasters such as Earthquakes or Typhoons.

This is why Wikipedia and other “Open Source” projects are able to continuously adapt, grow and survive the threats or vulnerabilities to this resilient and self-healing network.

A crisis appears in your business only when you are unable to adapt and withstand the impact of the virtual or physical forces thrust upon you.

"Whether it is the economic well being of the U.S. or the privacy laws in Europe.  The shock wave of a VBIED or insider threat."

Your organization could reach an Operational Risk crisis state, if you have not embraced the architecture of the "Starfish Community”.

Learn from the best on how to withstand the test of time and and all that humanity has in store for us.

And to all of those who are on the front lines of crisis everyday.  God Speed.  You know who you are…

Organizational Innovation: Demonstrated Abilities on the Front Lines...

  Who is talking in the front of the room right now?

Is it the boss again or the CxO that is telling others that work in the organization what they should think and what they should be doing?

Or is it one of the members of the organization presenting their validated research, the data collected and the answers from questions to the real customer, the end user or the investor?

Leaders who are asking open ended questions from the audience and from the "Back of the Room" will be getting more clarification.  They may be also curious of the speakers motivations for their research investigations and experiments.

These same leaders who are listening and verifying information recognize that the true innovation is going to come from far outside the building.

"Future innovation and solutions will originate from outside the organization from true professionals in the area of responsibility with those that have real world problem-sets."

These problem-sets from the field, from the organizations and Critical Infrastructure entities in the same neighborhood, city, county or state shall be the true focus.

Radical transparency with data collected from the customer, the user, the inventor, or the researcher is where the hypothesis is created.

Are you still talking about what you want on the “Zoom” for the majority of the time allocated?

How will you ever discover if the hypothesis is correct?  How will you ever be able to adapt, change or refine what the real problem-set is, that requires your expertise and focus?

Innovation in your organization will be scarce while you are still up in front of the meeting talking.

meritocracy

noun

mer· i· toc· ra· cy

: a system, organization, or society in which people are chosen and moved into positions of success, power, and influence on the basis of their demonstrated abilities and merit.

What are you still doing inside the building?  Why are you still in front of the room or on the Zoom talking?

The corporations and responsible agency or other entities in your area of responsibility need you to be listening to their problem-sets.

They need you to ask them clarifying questions based upon their presentation of the issues, the possible innovation required to solve the problem.

Get out there!  Onward…

Trust Decisions: The Wealth of Our Cognitive and Digital Transactions...

As you embark on your journey out the door today, you will be required to make dozens of "Trust Decisions".  You and the digital smart machines and the numerous human and digital trust transactions that you will encounter is quite fundamental.  Or is it?

As you walk into your office building the surveillance cameras are watching you and recording your behavior.  The iPhone in your pocket is transmitting your unique signals to digital data sensors embedded in the lobby.  As you press the button on the elevator to go up to your office, you are making another affirmative decision to trust.

When you step off at your floor and approach the door to your office, you might utilize your small "Radio Frequency Identity (RFID) device to swipe a small square mounted on the wall.  You hear the deadbolt unlock and you are now granted access to your office space to start your workday.

Now as you approach your corner office, you glance at the top of the screen of your iPhone to see if you are connected automatically to the corporate wireless network and the VPN.  When you were granted access to the office, the corporate computer network knew you were now present in the office and you have been automatically granted access for your role on numerous software applications on your computing devices.

Start your day at work and now the number of digital trust encounters has just begun.  The "Trust Decisions" that you and your digital devices will be making, could reach into the hundreds after a long 8 hour day.  

Yet there are five principles that emerged in May of 2015 from Oxford professor and author Jeffrey Ritter in his book "Achieving Digital Trust" we should consider now:

• Every transaction creating wealth first requires an affirmative decision to trust.
• Building trust creates new wealth.
• Sustaining trust creates recurring wealth.
• Achieving trust superior to your competition achieves market dominance.
• Leadership rises (or falls) based on trust (or the absence of trust).

Think about a day in the life of your entire organization and the number of digital trust transactions that have nothing to do with actual monetary currency transfers.  The wealth that is being described here on first glance may be thought of in terms of dollars or yuan or property, yet what about the wealth of human trust?

 A plentiful amount or an abundance of anything.  How tangible is the decision to trust the computing machine before you, or the person sitting across the desk who is a key supplier or that new client half way around the world just sending you a text message?

You see, we walk to work and communicate everyday, making hundreds of trust decisions.  Our corporate computing devices are making tens of thousands or millions of transactions of trust each hour.  The rules, information and calculations are known, because they are being measured.  Jeffrey Ritter says it this way:

Take a moment and think about each of these with respect to what you do in your business or in your job. How does the organization acquire wealth? Where does new wealth originate? How are customers retained? What provokes them to keep coming back and paying for your goods or services? Why does the leader in your market succeed? If you are not the market leader, why not? How is the loyalty of your team maintained? 

 The future is clear and becoming more revealing to us each day.  Digital trust, security and privacy of your organization and our societies are being defined before us in plain sight.  Can you see it?

Making "Trust Decisions" today at work and as you navigate home for the evening will be more apparent.  A heightened understanding of digital trust and how you engage with these transactions each waking hour may assist you in creating new wealth.  Improving the trust you have with AI computing machines and others at home or work, can make all the difference in life.

Where do you work and live?  Washington, DC.  Denver.  London.  Dublin.  Zurich.  Sydney.  It doesn't matter anymore because we are all connected by the Internet.  The opportunity for the societies of our planet to utilize "Information & Communication Technology" (ICT) to produce greater wealth is still before us.

How will you proceed with your “Trust Decisions”?