Never in the first five minutes.
Let me begin by saying that the Sustainable Development Goals, which is the 17 goals listed here, is our common vocabulary.
Even though this is in kanji, but even if I’m speaking in Europe, in South America, or whatever, I don’t have to translate this slide, because everyone understand the 17 icons and what they mean. The great thing about digital transformation is something like the Sustainable Development Goals.
By inventing an index that joins peoples’ ideas together, even when people don’t know each other before, before the Internet, people can only cooperate, meaning I know you first, and you know her, and then we start working on something.
We must have, in our mind, an image of the other people we are working with. In the digital transformation era, we can collaborate. Meaning I don’t know you, and you don’t know her, but we use the same hashtag.
We can say hashtag, I don’t know, MeToo, or #ClimateStrike. With the raise of the SNS, the social networking services, sometimes, people first see the hashtag, and then they start working together, before they meet.
Sometimes, they never meet, but they still use crowdfunding and crowdsourcing, reach great things together. That is how the common good can make itself seen in the digital era. Before, the common good can only be seen among people who already know each other somewhat.
Now, the common good can be manifested just by looking at trending hashtag on SNS. This is a fundamentally different landscape, compared to pre-social media era. When I’m making introduction of myself to the United Nations during UNGA and so on, I just say, “I’m the digital minister in charge of social innovation.”
Digital Minister means 17.18, making sure that everybody’s data is trusted by everybody else, using distributed ledger and other technologies. It means 17.17, by making sure that we all have in our mind the same objective fact.
We can discover the common problems and start working together, finally, 17.6. When we invented someone, we can share with anyone for them to change it in the way that fit their society, instead of colonizing them, by forcing their society to change to our technology.
This theory of change is not invented by myself. Indeed, it’s not invented by anyone, not even Jeffrey Sachs. What they have done is to ask a million people around the world, “What do you want to see in the year 2030?”
Then the million voices became the 169 targets. That then gets sorted to the 17 goals. The greater thing about this participatory design is that, whichever goal you are working on in the 169, it only help the other 168.
It doesn’t hurt the other 168, which is why I always begin my slides with this one. All the controversial issues, everything that is zero-sum, is taken out during the SDG process. What is left is only things that are complementary to each other.
This is the first answer to the idea of digital transformation. It first let people realize their common values by making it very cheap to share facts together. That is the answer to this part. Now, this one is very, very interesting.
This says, “OK, now, we have the same facts, but still, we can see each other in this relationship.” We have the same fact. This is a rope. If you want to increase the economy, the GDP, maybe sometime, the environment sustainability suffers.
If you want to preserve environment, sometime, the GDP decreases. This is a typical relationship. If we talk about innovation, sometimes, innovation in the industry are disruptive, meaning that it change the way the society works for greater efficiency.
These are called disruptive innovation. On the other hand, the social innovators care about social justice, meaning that people must live up to their opportunity, regardless of when and where they are born.
Sometime, these two kind of innovation, the industrial disruption and the social equality, also are in the same relationship of having to make tradeoffs. This shape is usually answered in the traditional 20th century public administration theory by the government.
The government has different ministries. Ministry of Economy take care of the economical interest. The Ministry of Environment takes care of the environment interest. The Ministry of Science and Technology take care of the destructive innovations, and the Ministry of Interior takes care about the equality and justice.
The career public service, including the think tanks and everybody else in the government, the public sector, are invisible. They are hidden. Nobody see them. Everybody only see the ministers, but internally, we are doing this tug-of-war.
Finally, after the ministers or the member of the parliament organize the stakeholders together, the career public service fight internally, but nobody knows about it. Then we set an arbitration, meaning that maybe we tax a carbon tax or something like that, to make sure that it is fairly distributed between the two interests.
This is classical last-century public administration theory. Unfortunately, the theory doesn’t work now, mostly because of hashtags. #MeToo, #ClimateStrike, or Blockchain, SelfDrivingVehicles, all have no corresponding ministers.
Even if we have a minister for every emerging technology, it would not work, because people would not report to the minister. The minister is not working as an organizer anymore. People can organize perfectly on Facebook, on Twitter, on the SNS.
They don’t need a minister or a member of the parliament to organize themselves. If we insist on this model, we will become irrelevant, meaning that we will be seen as too far from the people. People are already organizing perfectly well using the collaboration model among themselves already.
Right now, we are seeing in Hong Kong, they are singing “Sing Hallelujah to the Lord.” That is their hashtag [laughs] today, and they are organizing on the street using just that hashtag. They don’t need any leader to organize.
We must change our way of governance. To answer that question directly, instead of asking what is the organizers and who sets the arbitration, which is impossible to answer now, we ask a different set of questions.
We ask, people have different positions, but do they have common values? If we discover the common values, can we innovate to deliver those values, without leaving anybody behind? It is the two-phase question.
The first is to find how might we do something that’s important to all of us? In design thinking, this is called HMW, how might we identify our common values? The second is are there any solutions, any ideas, any innovation that can answer about this common value?
This, in design thinking, is the second diamond, called development and delivery. This is our new governance model that we’re cultivating here in the Social Innovation Lab. The United Nations has a name for it.
It’s called Co Gov. They just write Co Gov, with no dash in it. I am old-fashioned, so I’m still writing a dash. It’s like email. Everybody start writing dash email, but nowadays, we just take the dash out. [laughs] This is called Co Gov.
Co Gov means collaborative governance, and it means identifying values before starting to fight. It means identifying solutions that take care of most people’s feelings. I will use one example before returning to your questions.
Here is my office. You saw me in my office. That’s downstairs. Everybody can meet me for 40 minutes every Wednesday from 10:00 AM to the night. They can book my time very easily. There is a booking system automatically, so that if you really want to meet me, you can just find a time slot that I have, and you can know who else is meeting me, as well.
If you want to meet me, but you don’t have time to make a reservation, you can just show up from 10:00 AM to 2:00 PM. That doesn’t need reservation, but sometime, you have to stand in that line to queue a little bit.
This is like a self-service system to participate in the social innovation. The only condition that I impose is that I will put recorder here. After 10 days, we will publish everything online for everybody else to see.
You can see, after becoming the digital ministers, I have talked with 4,000 people over almost 1,000 meetings, speaking 200,000 sentences. Each of them is not just a summary, but rather something that is entirely quotable.
Because of this, the important thing here is that each and every sentence has its own web address. Using this web address, we can share and create hashtags. In this sense, we are as close to the social movement as we are close to the government.
I’m on the link, this point, the Lagrange point, between the social movement on one side and the private sector interests on the other side, also, connecting them to the government and to the ecological community.
Radical transparency is the first step to build common values, because if we don’t have that, people who come to my office hour will only talk about their own interest. Given radical transparency, they must find something of common interest. Otherwise, it looks very bad to them.
They [laughs] have to at least think about the common values when they are meeting me. If their ideas warrant an experimentation, like there were people meeting me saying, “I have those self-driving cars, and I want to drive it here in the Social Innovation Lab. I want Minister Audrey Tang to sit on it to prove to everybody that it is safe.”
I’m like, [laughs] “How can I vouch something that is safe?” They are like, “No, these are tricycles. Those are very slow. They are slower than one person running. It’s perfectly safe. If it runs into a wall, nobody gets hurt.” It’s very slow. [laughs]
What this does is that, when it is running around in the Social Innovation Lab here, they run three hackathons, meaning participatory design sessions, so we can form a norm. Meaning what people expect from this self-driving technology, before we make any law about it.
This is another difference. This is about the implementation and delivery part. Previously, the lawmakers have to make a law about things we don’t have any first-time experience. Now, it allows people to have one year of firsthand experience before we think about laws and regulations.
People were really trying these out, because they are open hardware and open source. People can change it however they want. Some of them want it to be a shopping cart that follows the shoppers around, so you can put flowers in it.
To do this, they must have two eyes that can track, can blink, and can read people’s expressions, so they added those components in. All of this means that it is now used outside of the product designer’s vision.
The people who originally put this together in Boston, in MIT Media Lab, never thought that they will be used in this particular way in Taiwan. The community, because they contributed in the design, accept that it is part of the society.
This is how we avoid the common tradeoff, as the question asked, between the social values and the industrial values. It’s as simple as making the common good itself be the brainstorming and value-setting, agenda-setting process.
Asking the innovators to fulfill the delivery and implementation process, these two, taken together, forms the complete design thinking double diamond that is unified by common values, which is that “how might we” question here. That is my answer to this tug-of-war or this zero-sum thinking.
Finally, the question about how do we identify the value communication when we’re developing a service? With product, the capability, and the affordance of the product is its own value communication.
If something that makes me see better, I’m convinced that it makes me see better. [laughs] It needs no explanation. For services such as, as I just mentioned, a self-driving vehicle that helps you to shop around in the open farmers market, or a drone that helps you to deliver goods to your home, people don’t care about the drone or the vehicle.
People care about having the goods arrive on-time, that the pizza doesn’t get flipped over, [laughs] and the flowers don’t destroyed by this self-moving shopping cart. In a word, they care about their life, not any particular technology that implement these life goals.
