The House has passed the first comprehensive reform package of the health insurance industry in decades, which is now up for debate in the Senate. This is a highly complex issue, but there are some quite basic reasons why it's so difficult to accomplish significant reform, and in part these have to do with psychological responses to change and uncertainty.
A few years ago I was fortunate to work with a couple of organizational consultants, and they introduced me to the concept of NICs and PUFs. These funny sounding acronyms give insight into why health care reform is so difficult for many people to support. (And once you have this shorthand for thinking about scenarios, you find ways that they apply in all aspects of life.)
The two acronyms, and their counterparts PICs and NUFs, refer to the likelihood that something will happen, whether the impact with be positive or negative, and how quickly the impact will happen.
PICs: Positive, Immediate and Certain. This is the best case--a good impact will be for sure happening to me soon.
NICs: Negative, Immediate and Certain. This is the worst case--a bad impact that will surely happen, and right away. People instinctively avoid these as much as possible.
PUFs: Positive, Uncertain and Future. Something good may happen, but if it does, it will be in an indeterminate future, and I don't really know how good it will be if it does happen.
NUFs: Negative, Uncertain and Future. The opposite of course, that something bad may happen at some point in the future, with an uncertain degree of badness.
Applying these to the health care debate, they clearly illustrate why there is resistance to reform.
The consequences of reform in terms of money-out-of-pocket, quality of care, and choice of care are all unclear for most people, naturally so since the changes are complex. It's therefore unclear whether the changes will be positive or negative in nature. Depending on one's financial situation, job security, and satisfaction with current health care service, one may be inclined to see the change going more in the positive or negative direction.
The battle over the public option partly revolves around whether people will get bumped off their existing plans and onto a government plan. This would represent potentially a large scale change, and again may be seen positively or negatively depending on one's circumstances. But when that switch may happen is unclear. Would the introduction of the public plan cause an immediate sweeping change as employers dropped their private insurance for the public plan, or would the status quo hold? Since this is unclear, people have differing opinions about how it will play out.
People who see PICs in health care reform obviously support it--they think it will bring positive changes, quickly. This may be because they stand to gain personally, or see immediate benefits for those who are currently under- or uninsured.
People who see NICs are against reform, believing that it will have immediate negative results, whether for themselves or others.
PICs and NICs are going to be hard for politicians to sway as they are pretty entrenched in their positions (anchored by the Certainty and the perceived near-term consequences). Immediate impacts, whether positive or negative, often have a more powerful influence than ambiguous longer-term ones. That's why dieting is difficult--immediate pleasure of a cupcake now vs possible ambiguous connection to expanded waistline later. It's also why saving is difficult--the benefits in the far of future feel less compelling that buying the latest gadget or trinket today.
It’s the PUFs and NUFs that are the swing votes in the health care debate, and here we are tending to see the “devil you know is better than the devil you don’t” dynamic playing out. With something as literally life and death as health care and insurance, the glass-half-empty NUFs tend to outweigh optimistic PUFs. If there is a chance of a negative result that you can’t define or predict, then it can seem safer to stick with the status quo rather than hold out hope for an ambiguous improvement at an indeterminate point in the future.
(Credit:
Sustainable Life Media)
The Social Capital Markets (SOCAP) Conference, a landmark gathering of top business and government leaders creating market-based solutions for social impact, is taking place September 1-3, at San Francisco’s Fort Mason Center.
SOCAP brings together a unique mix of the world’s leading social innovators--traditional investors, impact investors, social entrepreneurs, philanthropists, new media, NGO’s and non-profits, wealth managers, development agencies, venture capitalists, MBA students, and other groups interested in the growing opportunities of social capital--who are catalysts of change across the globe.
Last year’s conference gathered more than 650 leading global investors and entrepreneurs from 26 countries. This year’s conference from September 1-3 in San Francisco is sold out again and features speakers from the Skoll Foundation, Participant Productions, Food Inc, GRITtv, LINKtv, Invisible Children, Global Giving, the World Economic Forum, Virgance, Kiva, Change.org, Ushahidi, McKinsey, The Economist, and many others. The opening keynote will be given by Sonal Shah, director of the White House Office for Social Innovation.
“SOCAP09 is the premier event that puts the flow of capital to social good into a context,” says Founder Kevin Jones. “In these turbulent times, social innovators in the public and private sectors, from foundations to social venture funds to development agencies to grassroots Web 2.0 activists, are working together to build a new economic foundation for the world. With our expert speakers, high-impact sessions, and exciting networking events, SOCAP09 is an essential gathering for anyone interested in the burgeoning field of social capital.”
We will be there, too, and will report back. You can also follow the conference online via:
Twitter: @socap09,#socap09
This week's collection of remarkable marketing links, curated by the frog marketing team.
Super-Powerful: An energy-generating bike rental system.
Personal: Jeff Jarvis announces on his blog that he has prostate cancer. How public do we want our health to be?
Creepy: Meet your Facebook contacts in a movie trailer cum gaming environment.
Obama I: The message is the message: New York Magazine thinks that “Obama’s ubiquitous appearances as professor-in-chief, preacher-in-chief, father-in-chief, may turn out to be the most salient feature of his presidency.”
Obama II: Funny How?: Matt Bai believes that Obama’s “improvisational asides are like bubbles of air reaching the surface of placid water, reminders that while he remains immersed in the process of Washington, his lifeline to the world outside remains intact.”
The Truth about Amsterdam: Creative video response to a Fox smear campaign against Amsterdam.
The JK Wedding Entrance Video: Again and again, celebrate the mundane!
TruthyPR nails it: “The lesson for you to take from this is that your cause or your brand no matter how boring probably has an angle that you haven't found yet that would be entertaining to interact with. You don't need a new content management system. You don't need a new widget. You don't need to redesign your website.You have to be able to laugh at yourself a bit, and find someone unshackled by your organization's tradition to think about new ways of engaging the public. You need to be publishing more.Writing more. Recording more. You need more content and you need to find people who can do that for you over and over, since many of their attempts will fall flat. In short, you need editorial staff. And then you need to let them run.”
That's exactly what we're going to do until next week.
(Credit:
Design Policy)
Design is not the answer to everything, but it certainly has an important role to play in almost everything that holds a society together.
In light of the current economic crisis, several U.S. professional design organizations (AIGA, IDSA, and others), design education accreditation organizations, and Federal Government officials have seized the historic opportunity and joined forces to launch an initiative to shape a U.S. National Design Policy. In a moment of great global uncertainty and an erosion of national confidence, designers are perfectly positioned to take on a leadership role in "Re-designing America's Future," and the proposed policy is supposed to give them a more effective platform. "Design is the world remade in human form," the initiative's Web site states. And there's a lot of remaking to do these days. We know that "beautiful things work better." These days, however, only "meaningful" things make a real difference. And collective action is required.
As a result of a November 2008 meeting in Washington, the initiative has published "Redesigning America's Future: Ten design policy proposals for the United States of America's economic competitiveness and democratic governance." The document strives to demonstrate how design "improves policy success by making it relevant to the People." As stated in the document: "Design serves to advance the goals of the United State's economic competitiveness by saving time and money and simplifying the use, manufacturing, and maintenance of goods and services. It enhances democratic governance by improving the performance and delivery of government services."
More details can be found on the U.S. National Design Policy Initiative Web site, including a downloadable version of the "Redesigning America's Future" report.
National Congresspeople received the publication in their mail boxes January 20. If you support the initiative and want them to act upon it, you can write them directly.
In addition, you can take part in a viral video campaign that asks supporters to record a brief "I Pledge" endorsement to be uploaded to the initiative's YouTube page or the Facebook page.
Almost three years after Jeff Howe coined the term in his seminal article "The Rise of Crowdsourcing," and, ironically, in the very week 1,300 handpicked scientists, entrepreneurs, artists, and other thinkers, movers, and shakers assembled at the TED conference in Long Beach, the term "crowdsourcing" yielded more than 1 million search results on Google.
That's quite an accomplishment. Crowdsourcing is no longer an exclusive noun for a few in the know, it has become a verb for the crowd. Mom-and pop shops, SME's, and large corporations, receptionists, interns, middle managers, and CEOs – everyone's crowdsourcing these days and calling it so (even if they just ask a few friends to particpate in a mini-survey...).
Here's a little piece of nostalgia, THE crowdsourcing primer starring Jeff Howe:
Interestingly, the power of the crowd has not translated yet into the one realm whose decisions have arguably the biggest power to impact the crowd: politics. Since Obama's masterful use of social media helped restore trust in the American ideal of democracy, and his emphatic election fomented expectations of all-inclusive "power-to-the-people" digital governance, most of the attempts to establish an effective crowdsourced model of policy-making have fallen flat, at least so far. While the new US president has issued several executive orders introducing a new level of transparency to governance (on this topic, for a divergent opinion, it is worth reading Noah Feldman's "In Defense of Secrecy" essay in the NY Times Magazine), the mechanisms of collaborative political decision-making have yet to find a proper forum on the social web.
Sure, there are dozens of open forums that aggregate input and funnel it to the decision-makers – from Public Agenda to the rather light-hearted advertising riff "Dear Mr. President" (Pepsi). And on change.gov, there were Obama's invitation during the transition to submit input for his political agenda ("share your vision") as well as Tom Daschle's video responses to people's suggestions on healthcare ("citizen briefing book"). Perhaps the most ambitious project so far, however, was MySpace and Change.org's "Ideas for America" initiative. The site yielded 7,875 ideas by way of crowdsourcing and then distilled them down (through 675,943 votes) to ten ideas presented to the administration. Yet even though a blog is tracking the progress, it is somewhat unclear if and when the top ten ideas are actually becoming action items incorporated into national policy.
What's lacking is transparency when it matters. If all the crowdsourced ideas remain in a sand box without visible, actionable outcome, the enthusiasm to engage in politics (that was so salient during the presidential campaign) will slowly fade. Yet the missing link between input and outcome is not an easy task given the many legal and bureaucratic restrictions the administration is facing. For the time being, it is the experts who govern. The crowd will have to wait before its ideas will make a real difference in setting the national agenda.
(Credit:
David Reece)
A few months after Barack Obama’s historic election, and a couple of weeks after the release of Barry Libert’s and Rick Faulk’s book Obama Inc. (and, of course, Obama's inauguration), the first start-ups are popping up that directly apply some of the widely heralded business lessons emerging from the innovative campaign. The fact that most of these lessons lie in the marketing domain supports the view I’ve expressed earlier and on numerous occasions: 1) Marketing will (again) become the number one change agent in business, 2) when it follows the new rules of “marketing with meaning,” that is, marketing which (simply put) consistently creates added social value – not as an afterthought but a sine qua non. While marketing has always been the art of turning friends into customers and customers into friends, it is now the art of finding, befriending, and “activating” the like-minded for a common cause, for the common good, for profit. Marketing, as the “voice” of business, is THE interface in a time when interface is everything. Marketing is the software. And software drives the value of products.
A recent example of this kind of Obama Inc. start-up, San Francisco-based firm Virgance, was featured in the Economist this week, and the article indicates that social impact in an activism 2.0 world is shifting from a welcome side benefit to an integral component in the business models of Internet entrepreneurs. The new kids on the web have internalized the lessons from the Obama campaign, and now they want to make a difference, too – and money. The Economist describes Virgance’s model as “for-profit-activism.” Named after a plot device in Star Wars, the company aims to support social causes through a multi-pronged campaign platform that resembles the way Obama for America mobilized its supporters, and it typically consists of four core elements: a web-empowered volunteer network, a presence on Facebook, a team of paid bloggers to promote the campaigns, and YouTube viral videos. Among the first Virgance-supported campaigns are 1BOG (“one block off the grid” – aiming to convince homeowners to switch to solar energy), Carrotmobs (public contests that incentivize retailers to become green), and Lend Me Some Sugar (based on the Facebook application that gives users virtual sugar cubes for donations to a cause of their choice).
Virgance is not the first for-profit-do-gooder of course; there have been plenty of others whose business model combines bottom line thinking with social value: the Economist, for example, puts Virgance in a line with Project RED. But Virgance is more like Facebook Causes. It adopts the forces of “Here Comes Everybody” and builds its entire business on a social web platform, embracing the principles of open-source, mass collaboration, and transparency: “If a for-profit company did the type of work that non-profits often do, but did it more efficiently, would people trust it the same way they trust non-profits?” the Virgance web site describes the company’s ambitious mission. ”What if everything the company did was completely transparent? What if it was open source? If we can create this kind of company, and succeed, how many other companies would follow our example? Along the way, could we change the face of the business world itself?”
Does that language sound familiar? The Obamapreneurs are adept at turning their campaigns into movements. Clearly, the Obamanization of business – both in terms of substance and style – has arrived in reality, and we will see more Obama Inc.’s in 2009.
On February 27-28, IESE Business School will gather entrepreneurs, scientists, foundations, and corporations at its annual student-run Doing Good and Doing Well conference in Barcelona. It’ll be interesting to see how the Obama gem will make its way into the more old-school world of CSR (corporate social responsibility).
2009 will be a year of major uncertainty. The doom and gloom of the economic downturn, the deterioration of mass markets, the pervasiveness of the digital lifestyle, a host of explosive political conflicts, and the fragmentation of traditional societal institutions are causing anxiety and propel a new search for simplicity and non-economic value systems.
Consumption-driven wealth and status are being replaced by identity, belonging, and a strong desire to contribute and do something "meaningful" rather than just acquire things. Trust and reputation are no longer enablers for the exchange of goods, services, and information, they are replacing them. Values are the new value. Meaning is succeeding experience and customer satisfaction. "The job of leadership today is not just to make money. It's to make meaning," writes management consultant John Hagel. Out: Bottom-line-pragmatists and financial wizards. In: philosophers and ethicists.
This new cultural climate presents a historic opportunity for brands to transform themselves into arbiters of meaning. Becoming Chief Meaning Officers, business leaders must move beyond simply connecting products and customers with the goal to facilitate transactions - they must now create "meaning" through actions and interactions. When your brand is a vector, your base becomes a movement - that's what we learned from Barack Obama's campaign.
In 2009, we will see more examples of "meaningful marketing" and businesses generating value that goes beyond just meeting consumers' needs. This will imply several profound paradigm shifts: essence instead of luxury, free sharing instead of monetized scarcity, radical transparency instead of brand control, authenticity instead of image, empathy instead of focus groups, conversations instead of messaging, collaboration instead of dissemination. A "meaning surplus" will become imperative: Only brands that give more than they take will be able to create sustained brand loyalty.
(Credit:
design mind)
A somewhat unconventional yet challenging task: Newsweek invited four "hot (and nonpartisan) design firms" to provide ideas and design direction for "resurrecting the Republican brand," featured in this week's (December 29) print issue. The full-page feature presents concepts by frog design (full disclosure: my employer), Pentagram, Razorfish, and The Groop.
The article is not available online so check it out at a news stand (and support print media!).
I am finally reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s mesmerizing book The Black Swan – The Impact of The Highly Improbable, and I am intrigued by the parallels you can draw to Obama’s campaign (they may be quite a stretch, but those are the best, no?)
In a chapter titled “Living in the Antechamber of Hope,” Taleb refers to empirical research showing that on average venture capitalists capitalize better on innovations than the actual innovator, that publishers make more money with books than writers, that agents do better than artists, and that R&D managers do better than scientists: “The person involved in such gambles is paid in a currency other than material success: hope.” As Taleb argues, most artists and scientists spend most of their life waiting for that one big rewarding event that gets them the recognition they’d been hoping for and justifies for “the social consequences of the appearance of continuous failure,” the discrimination that goes along with a consistently volatile social status: “The problem of lumpy payoffs is not so much in the lack of income they entail, but the pecking order, the loss of dignity, the subtle humiliations near the water cooler.”
In other words: Creatives and scientists wait for what Taleb calls a “black swan,” a highly improbable event -- like Obama’s election. Such event becomes all the more meaningful the more improbable it is. A 47-year old African-American senator with the name Barack Hussein Obama elected US president? Musicians, writers, painters, sculptors, actors, directors, scientists, and other members of the “hoping class” -- which basically includes all those professions for which only extreme outcomes are relevant (this obviously excludes doctors, lawyers, and, yes, also plumbers) -- could easily identify with Obama as he represented their very own existential struggle: overcoming the empirical odds, fighting an impossible fight, striving for that one rare, visible moment of reward. His pursuit of excellence matched theirs, and his message of "hope" provided a perfectly clean slate onto which they could project their own.
Hope goes a long way. Taleb recounts the narrative of the novel Il Deserto dei Tartari by Dino Buzzati, the story of a young officer who is assigned to a remote fortress protecting the nation from a highly unlikely attack from the bordering desert (that no human has ever crossed). First, he is desperately looking for a loophole to bail out, but after a mysterious revelation he embraces his destiny and decides to extend his stay. He ends up spending his whole life at the outpost, "thirty-five years of pure hope, spent in the grip of the idea that one day (…) the attackers will eventually emerge and help him rise to the occasion.” And ultimately make sense of it all. The end, however, is tragic: the officer dies in a roadside inn shortly before the event he has been waiting for all his life finally takes place.
Missing the “black swan,” the highly improbable event of a lifetime, is one form of tragedy, but the occurrence of such event poses a challenge for those who had desired it, too. It can lead to the kind of postpartum depression many Obama supporters are experiencing now -- serious withdrawal and a deflation of high-riding emotions. The “Principle of Hope” (Ernst Bloch) works only as long as Utopia stays Utopian. Now that the movement has arrived at its final destination, and the tribes have been subsumed by the broader (media) phenomenon of Generation O, how do the hopeful move on and go back to their individual lives?
Recognizing that a “black swan” is not just a figment of the imagination, accepting it into the canon of the probable, and stripping it of its unique sensation, comes with a painful catharsis among believers -- because we made it happen, maybe this is all there is. The significance of the historic collective accomplishment brutally exposes one's own individual insignificance. What remains is a very personal hang-over, an obscure disappointment about hope being resolved in actuality.
(Credit:
Gino Rossi)
We Feel Fine is “an exploration of human emotion on a global scale.” The site, created by Brooklyn-based artist Jonathan Harris and Stanford computational math professor and former Google employee Sep Kamvar, looks like exactly the result of these two minds combined: emotional data mining with a human touch and an artistic interface -- a particularly beautiful application of moodgraphics.
The site is driven by a huge database that browses the web for emotional expressions around the globe and maps them graphically: “Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases ‘I feel’ and ‘I am feeling.’ When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the ‘feeling’ expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.).”
The result is a recording of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 to 20,000 new feelings per day. Sounds Orwellian but it is actually pretty touching. Like the congenial PostSecret, We Feel Fine provides viewers with a voyeuristic act in mutual consent. Seeing other people’s feelings is emotional; seeing other people describe their feelings is comforting.
Since it launched in 2006, the site has been written up exhaustively. The Pop!Tech blog (hat tip) recently rediscovered it -- in the light of the strong collective emotions around Obama’s election and the rise of the new We Generation, “what we feel” is suddenly back on the map again.
