On Monday (and over the past few months), members of the Value Web had the privilege of supporting the first gathering of the Global Shapers Community in Davos. Two days before the start of the official programme at Davos, 70 Global Shapers, from all corners of the globe, came together and spent a full day exploring their dreams and aspirations, sharing their perspectives on critical issues, and finding ways to help one another achieve objectives specific to their upcoming week at Davos.The issues they identified were framed within 4 Pillars that are central to the programme of the Annual Meeting this year: 1) Resource & Sustainability, 2) Growth & Employment, 3) Leadership & Innovation, and 4) Society & Technology.

During the session on Monday, small groups of Shapers worked on identifying the issues critical to their generation within this pillar framework, and then explored these issues through the lens of their regions. We emerged from the day with a list of approximately 48 critical issues, which have been submitted to the Global Shapers private online platform for input and prioritization from the 530 Shapers who are not physically present in Davos. Those who are present in Davos will spend the week attending and speaking at many sessions, both on the public and private programme. On Sunday, four Global Shapers will participate as panelists at the closing plenary, and will share their own personal insights and experiences from the

week in addition to a synthesis of the experiences and perspectives of their fellow Shapers, which we will arrive at through a series of workshops on Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

It’s been an incredible honor to be part of the inaugural Global Shapers gathering, and we at the Value Web are thrilled to see how this group will contribute to the dialogue here in Davos, and more importantly, how they will continue to help shape the emerging paradigm. This theme this year at Davos is The Great Transformation: Shaping New Models - and the Shapers are arriving as a WEF community just in time to contribute much needed and valuable insights and innovative solutions from the perspective of a generation that will have to live with this transformation (however it emerges) for a long time to come.

If you are curious to learn more, you can watch a livestream of the closing plenary here and can see the public facebook page for the Shapers here. We’ll be sure to report back with reflections post Davos.

Last 29th of November The Value Web supported with Graphic Facilitation the UN Global Compact LEAD Symposium: Unlocking Consumer Demand to Drive Sustainability throughout the Value-Chain. The session focused on understanding how the consumer trends are changing and how much they are influenced by the products that are offered.

The UN Global Compact is a strategic policy initiative for businesses that are committed to aligning their operations and strategies with ten universally accepted principles in the areas of human rights, labour,environment and anti-corruption. By doing so, business, as a primary driver of globalization, can help ensure that markets, commerce, technology and finance advance in ways that benefit economies and societies everywhere.

The 7th Annual YGL Meeting attracted more than 350 YGLs to Dalian, China and The Value Web was there to facilitate them. They had their own room– wing, really– of the Congress Center, so for the better part of 5 days, the YGLs hung out, networked and dreamed together about ways to make a difference in the world.

Day 1 began and ended with this question: What is your vision to improve the state of the world? It was explored through martial arts, theatre, and large and small group discussions. One important thread that kept emerging was the need to “protect the asset.”

Day 2 carried on with this theme asking YGLs to define quality growth. A group of Chinese YGLs kicked off the discussion and, while there were geographical differences in the answers to this question, almost everyone, everywhere agreed that quality growth was dependent on finding ways to enhance happiness and redefine the ‘success metrics’ to include happiness and well-being.

Day 3 was led by YGLs. Ahead of the YGL Annual Summit around 40 YGLs submitted op-ed articles related to the theme of the Summer Davos, “Mastering Quality Growth”, in which they defined what quality growth means to them. Nine were selected and profiled live in Dalian from an individual, community, organizational, societal, ecosystem and global perspective.

Throughout the rest of the week, YGLs met in their space to meet a variety of leaders, work on taskforces and to hear YGL-led ‘Leadership Competencies’ on topics as diverse as storytelling to Sustainable Business Models to Stone Soup to Protecting the Asset.

It was a great week and, as ever, a stellar experience working with the YGLs and the WEF team.

Below are just 2 of the many amazing graphics that Kelvy and Aaron crafted during the week. To see more from The Value Web team in China, go to our Flickr page.

The Value Web just returned from the 3^rd future symposium of the Generali Zukunftsfonds in Cologne, Germany, which is the non-profit division of Generali Insurance. Their aim is to counteract the growing overageing society by supporting projects that activate the existing potential of elderly people in regards to their competencies, energy and time.

170 participants from government, business, academia, non-profit organizations and volunteers joined the 3^rd future symposium to discuss impact measurement and social investment in the third sector and the engagement of the so-called “Generation 55 plus”.

Some key questions were:

• How can we measure social and political impact of volunteer work? What (new) models do we need, if at all?
• Is there actually such a thing as social return on investment?
• How can we best exploit the potential of Generation 55plus?
• How much can we count on civil society to support the engagement of Generation 55plus?

What we observed:

• Is impact measurement just another hype, as it could expand into a $500 billion industry in the next decade?
• What cannot be measured cannot be controlled; but should we still measure social impact although this might lead into economization of voluntary work?
• There is no one model to measure impact – we might need several “light” models for measurement: leave unnecessary administrative measurement tactics behind and just support what is effective
• Projects are only funded in the starting phase, nothing is left once they are up and running
• There is no failure culture: why can’t projects fail first to succeed in the end?
• The quality of an NGOs work is primarily determined by the quality of its relationships with its intended beneficiaries
• Generation 55plus is seen as being very credible but individuals of that group do not want to be squeezed into institutional frames and norms for impact measurement
• Sharing knowledge and learning across generations is key – despite their large experience of life, Generation 55plus is as eager to learn as the younger generation

Quotes that inspired participants and us:

“Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted.” Albert Einstein

“The most serious mistakes are not being made as a result of wrong answers. The truly dangerous thing is asking the wrong question.” Peter Drucker

“Take the experience and power of judgement of people over 50 out of this world, and there won’t be enough left to secure its existence.” Henry Ford

The Earth Security Initiative (ESI) aims to reposition the conservation of species and ecosystems as a major security issue. This is in addition to the importance of conservation for intrinsic or economic reasons. The understanding of our dependence on natural systems and the threats they face has greatly increased in recent years. However, the implications for human security of continuing to degrade oceans, forests and freshwater systems have not been well communicated. If conservation is recognized as essential for human security, it will concern a much broader sector of society and will likely lead to new funding streams as well as greater civil society support and political will for action.

The workshop, hosted by the Zoological Society of London (ZSL), aimed to develop and drive forward the Red Lines Agenda, which highlights the amount and location of natural ecosystems that need to be conserved if we are to ensure humans security. The workshop had four major objectives:

1. Define the Red Lines Agenda and current status of research (How much do we know about the amount and distribution of intact forests, oceans and freshwater systems needed to ensure human security?).

2. Identify major research gaps in the Red Lines Agenda.

3. Define criteria for identifying ecological ‘ticking time bombs’ (sites that will experience human security risks over the next 20 years due to poor governance of natural

resources) and form the basis of a paper that demonstrates where these sites are likely to be, current trends and the likely security risks associated with inaction.

4. Develop a communication strategy to place the Red Lines Agenda at the centre of Rio+20 and society as a whole.

The Value Web supported the workshop creating eight graphic frames of the key topics to be shared with other stakeholders and hopefully the rest of the world.

The Caritas Internationalis General Assembly in Rome, Italy, had the objective of discussing and agreeing on the strategic framework for years 2011-2015.
During the conference The Value Web supported the discussions and the decisions with a big and impactful visualization that summarized the main topics and helped to better frame the discussions.
Participants from 127 countries, different cultures and needs: this has been a challenging and exiting conference to support!

Development is effective when the broadest-possible group of stakeholders develop a shared vision about the future they want to create. So development workers depend on their skills in building collaboration and alignment to people who may not share points-of-view, languages, status, and understanding. Bridging these gaps is development.

In 2010, The Value Web began working with Oxfam America to help a diverse group of stakeholders design a water rights program in Ethiopia (above). Together with Oxfam and its partner NGOs, we designed and facilitated a three-day workshop in Addis Ababa for 65 village leaders, technical experts, government officials, and farmers.

Participant feedback was extremely positive and so the sponsors asked us to return to Ethiopia to share some of our tool-kit with them. So at the end of May 2011, we held a two-day training session in Addis Ababa for 35 development workers from Oxfam and its partner NGOs to develop skills around iterative workshop design and facilitation. The participants were, for the most part, highly-experienced facilitators working with diverse groups across Ethiopia to design long-term programs to alleviate hunger, assure equal access to water and other inputs, and help communities assemble the building blocks of social justice.

Although our purpose was to share our tools with Oxfam and its partners, we found that we had at least as much to learn from them as they did from us. In particular, their experience with creating a safe space for genuine dialogue in a context of power imbalance, gender exclusion, and illiteracy calls for facilitation approaches that are certainly valuable even in less-demanding circumstances.

We have been asked to follow-up with distance coaching and, later this year, an on-site refresher course.

As part of its effort to re-focus its activity from shipping and delivering food in emergencies to enabling countries and affected populations to better manage and prevent food crises, the UN’s World Food Programme is centralzing the management of various programme efforts (e.g., school feeding, nutrition, cash and vouchers) at its Rome headquarters.

To translate this objective into practical, on-the-ground action, WFP asked The Value Web to design and facilitate a two-day DesignSession with its Programme Division in April. As a result of this work, which WFP is now implementing, scarce technical support in these program areas will be able to respond more flexibly to ever-increasing demand.

WFP is the world’s largest humanitarian agency and provides food assistance to more than 90 million people in 73 countries.

This year’s overall theme of the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos was “Shared Norms for the New Reality”. While we have been co-designing events with the World Economic Forum for the Young Global Leaders for many years, this was the first time that the YGL community spent a full day together prior to the opening of the Annual Meeting. The objectives for this day were to better understand this New Reality, to discuss the skills needed to successfully navigate it and to reinforce the bonds among community members.

We started by giving an idea of what The New Reality might look like, to comprehend the future by looking at its possibilities through different lenses and from different perspectives.

Nine YGLs, at the forefront of their field gave their vision of the future. The lenses were diverse and ranged from “Shifting Economy”, “Digitalization/Big Data”, “Resource Scarcity”, “Redefinition of Work” to the “Dysfunction of Globalization”. We then gave the YGLs the opportunity to further refine the vision by engaging them in several one-on-one conversations which involved a deep listening exercise.

But we can’t describe all the possible futures! The only way to face it is to be prepared for radical changes. So we proposed the YGLs to experience such changes through an intense simulation run by one of the YGL community members: Dan Shapiro. The main lesson taken away from the exercise was striking. It seems that human beings, even when faced with the possibility of mass extinction always look out for their own individual benefit and not the common interest. Therefore the question remained if we, as a human species, will ever be able to truly collaborate and agree on solutions that benefit all of humanity before irreversible damage to our planet is done?

From that experience, we finished the day by analyzing the competencies required to navigate the New Reality and to address the challenge that human behavior can pose to overcoming global systemic challenges. Different groups worked on such competencies as “Global Facilitators”, “Creating Win-Win Solutions Across Stakeholders”, “Cross Cultural Communication”, “Dematerializing: More Value with Less”, “How to Protect the Personal Asset” and other necessary competencies to navigate the New Reality. Further the YGLs were asked to describe a training module so that these skills could possibly be taught to others in the future.

It was for us a truly amazing experience to see how 150 Young Global Leaders engaged with their soul, body and mind in thinking about ways how to shape a better future. For us it was a real pleasure to accompany such a dynamic community and to help them to become better leaders. By doing so we hope that can make a contribution to prepare our next generation of leaders to successfully deal with what is lying ahead for all of us.

Transmission Global Summit, Victoria, Canada.

How do you distill 49 roundtable conversations among 150 participants into a red thread and a synthesis model? Listen, make connections and don’t assume the answer beforehand.

Five members of The Value Web just came back from the Transmission Global Summit in Victoria, Canada where we supported a conference with key leaders in the digital media & arts industry. The conversations were structured around three general themes: protecting intellectual property rights versus connecting and opening up (protection/connection), balancing entrepreneurial spirit and ideation with corporate ability to realize commercial (inspiration/realization) and exploring global business opportunities while staying focused on local markets (globalization/localization).

We used a process that we are calling “harvesting & curation,” which is aimed at extracting insights from conversations, discussions and plenary speeches in order to identify the underlying red thread – or threads. Something we tried already at other occasions, but this time we had two people fully dedicated to just listen and iterate. Key was the support of  three groups that were dispersed among the roundtables, each attuned to a specific level of detail in the conversations: students from Royal Roads University who had volunteered to be table rapporteurs paid attention to key words and quotes; table facilitators listened for well formed ideas and models; and auditors identified strategic elements and common themes.

After each roundtable session, we ran separate debriefs where the outcomes were immediately fed back into the process and appeared on the knowledge wall with which participants interacted directly. We looked for bright ideas and memes, created word clouds, developed models and gained insights about overarching themes.

At the end of two days, we presented the red thread back to all participants in a summary presentation.

Here is what we found:

• Three vantage points have emerged from all conversations that helped to frame the right environment for a creative eco-system:

Consumer: What does the consumer actually want? It is mostly about the right scene, identity and cultural impact. But it is also about individual passion and the sense of community, in which they connect with other people.

Artist: For the artist, creativity is not a given, it is again about passion and inspiration and the right impulse to create.

Industry: The sense of urgency definitely comes from the industry vantage point. They have a vision about how the cultural artifacts can be spread. Again, passion is the key word here as we don’t want companies who already have an exist strategy in mind.

We then took those vantage points to understand how they connect together and what is shaping the conversation.

• We can no longer look at the old model of a value chain where mass-music was pushed out through traditional channels. Due to the financial crisis, the entire value chain has been displaced. Despite that we are all very aware of it, this has been the source of un-ease in many conversations as some people at the tables might no longer be around in the near future.

• The whole system has turned upside down with the consumer on one side and an ocean of choice on the other. The model we developed put the consumer and artist in relation, in which they connect through real passion and support with ideas around fair trade music. All of this is surrounded by a Global Registry of Internet Materials (GRIM) in response to the fraction of the existing system, which is a major barrier of globalization.

With the help of students who brought back key words from discussions, we created word clouds that show the real drivers of the conversations.

Connection / Protection:

What value does each player actually bring to the value chain?

Inspiration / Realization

When is it right to talk about money or is it rather about passion?

Globalization / Localization

Why do we want to be global if we actually don’t know what is happening locally around the corner?

Overall, this process of “harvesting & curation” has helped to refine the conversations and assured that the big ideas don’t fall off the table. In today’s fast paced world, listening and taking time to extract those ideas is key.

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Word clouds generated by Wordle

Related post: Pipe cleaners, tin foil and new possibilities

Watch the video for a recap of transmission.

Click here to view the embedded video.