My Digital FootPrint

Innotribe 2019: London The future of money What is money ? Is money a coin or currency that you have in your pocket? Is it the balance on your current account? Could money be the value of your stocks, shares or bonds? Or is money information and is information more than memory? How about M1, M2, M3 and M0. There is no simple definition, but money has characteristics and a future. Thinking about the future of money offers two important insights. If the future of money is faster, quicker and cheaper the focus will be on efficiency and effectiveness in back office admin, operations and engineering/ tech. There are a myriad of startups and internal projects focussed on this already. The enormous effort and VC backing says this is a future of money. As money becomes more digital, conceptually this is more than bits version of the atoms, it introduces new characteristics of money. Traditional money has known properties/ characteristics which are well documented (Fu...

Patterns of leadership in troubled times Skills for leadership are natural, learned and require continual refinement. New skills are forged in times of crisis. Conversely leadership as a position starts at a point in time, often when something new is started.   On the assumption that positional leadership starts when you start a company, division or something new, it is a truism that a leadership team will inevitably change over time, as the needs of the business change. Typically a founder will have a bias towards technology, science, innovation or marketing and will have created a new widget for someone who did not know they needed it. Such is the demand for growth that a founding skillset (innovation) has to quickly give way to finance, legal and management as scale is needed to satisfy stakeholder inquisitions. Leadership who leads knows that more (new) revenues are needed and will steer a team back towards skills that bring in creativity and innovation, lea...

Exploring why are we so tired using the framework of the unknown:unknown Summary  COVID19 is not a Black Swan event and it was predicted as far back as 2015 if not earlier. This article ponders why we are so mentally exhausted and how we should react next. It argues that we need leadership and structure at this time to ensure that this crisis does not become destructive to ourselves individually or collectively as a society. As leaders we need to hear, listen and accept a wider range of views, as we all search for a new “normal life”. As individuals, we need to take care of ourselves and keep a check on our level of exhaustion, which in this case is processing, learning and thinking exhaustion. It is mental and emotional exhaustion and not a physiological one. There is nothing we can do to process and make sense quicker, it will take time and we have to accept it and find the learnings and value in it. Sensemaking of our response to the fear of systemic risk and wh...

Revisiting unknown : unknown How are we responding to the fear of systemic risk and what is next? The matrix of known:unknown has been around since 1955 and is a super tool which helps map our understanding of risk for scenario planning and game theories. It has been updated numerous times and remains a current and useful tool. Whilst it definitely can help us think about “data” and where to focus and allocate limited resources, does it help with our response to COVID19? Applying the framework to our personal and collective responses, may help us understand where we are up to, in terms of our own understanding to COV19. The axes are, “it is known:unknown to ME” and “it is known:unknown to YOU.” Starting from the bottom left, a deep fear of the unknown. Sometime in Dec 2019 the majority of the world started to become aware of a new virus. For you and me this was firmly in the quadrant of unknown:unknown. Neither of us had any data on the virus, its effects on humans, the ramifi...

Should our policies and processes be reviewed/ challenged or should we depend on them more than ever? This short article walks through a framework to support complex investment decisions, especially during turbulent times. It is possible to make excellent returns (on investment) in all quadrants, don’t be fooled into thinking that one quadrant is the best (or better). Each quadrant has unique characteristics; the flow is to go through each one in turn, starting top right. However, before that it is worth examining the axes. The horizontal axis (X) is “how a decision is made” The extremes of the X-axis extends are Thought(ful) and Pain(ful). A thought(ful) decision means a) you are making an investment decision based on your experience and gut instinct, there is deep analysis and the key is that you have time to consider the options and consequences. b) The purchase decision (demand) for products and service at this extreme is slow and considered. You have time and th...

There are natural rhythms but we appear to ignore them in preference for rigid structure. Why have we lost the ideas and concepts humanity developed before our iWatch and Fitbit? When did time become our base for measurement and not rhythms? Indeed are rhythms important? “Time”, not spacetime, for us is fixed in chunks and measured by the universal “per second ”, with 1 second set by a cesium atomic clock , which are so accurate they will not drop 1 second in more than a billion years . But life is not like this and whilst time and distance are related, as is the need to have leap seconds to adjust for the earth's rotation, our life patterns are not as stable as the seconds we measure against. Where is the link to data and our digital life? We measure everything to the second and believe that with this measure, the data is correct. This data becomes our digital life clock and measurement rod. The point is that we have created a super accurate ...

image source :  http://www.buildbridgebond.com/ As a context I have explored the thinking that nature’s memory is not a digital memory and what are the implications of having perminancy of data (memory) in there two posts What type of memory does identity need? and Data is not Memory -- When in the charity (thrift) shop earlier this week, I was looking at the trinkets/ orderments that are largely from house clearances after someone has died. To that person who died these items were precious, valued and important. The trinket acted as a prompt or reminder of an important time, place, activity or relationship. However, without the person who made and holds that memory, the value of the item is lost to a resale value in a charity shop. Whilst it would be good to be able to create and pass on memories, which we do as learning and stories, we actually don’t pass on everything it has to be learnt and created in every case ( unlike machines and compute). Giv...