The courage to design the next Puerto Rico
(originally published Dec 2017)
What do you think of when you see this? Probably like many of us this photo is hard to see. It speaks to our disaster, our frailty, the struggle of our daily existence. For many this is still the daily reality. And although many people in Puerto Rico from local and federal government, public and private sector and civic society are doing amazing things, behind the scenes this is still the reality for so many of us. But this is not the end of our story. It’s just the beginning
SMLXL
STRUGGLE TO DEFINE OUR FUTURE
As we sit here the future Puerto Rico is slowly being crafted. But what that future is, where we will end up, is not defined. You see, in a disaster such as ours, where people are knocked back to basics, there is a temptation to simply get back to the old normal. Leaders are under pressure to push the needle back to what we understand and know. To rebuild. And thought we surely need to get back on our feet and get back basic services, it is not enough for the size of our ambitions. Nor does it live up to a promise we all make our children — to leave them more than we had.
THE SILVER LINING AND MANDATE FOR TRANSFORMATION
Instead of simply getting back to normal we must go beyond and take on the challenge of transforming Puerto Rico to something well beyond our financial, infrastructure, economic, and environmental disasters. In this disaster is opportunity to rethink, reimagine and reset Puerto Rico. To set us on a new path. Consider the quote:
“You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it’s an opportunity to do things
you think you could not do before.” — Rahm Emanuel
There is a moment now, at this very time, to break through stagnant positions and do, as he says, “things you think you could not do before.”
I am sure to you this is no surprise. You have heard this call to innovate Puerto Rico from others like our Economic Secretary Manuel Laboy when he said: “We have this historic opportunity: Instead of going with incremental changes, we can go and push the envelope to really transform the infrastructure. That is the silver lining opportunity that we have.”
OUR MOONSHOT
The size of our ideas must outweigh the size of our challenge. We cannot simply do a little better and call it innovation. It must be a Moonshot. Let me explain the origins of the word. In the early 1960s the United States found itself in a crisis like us. Competing for leadership of the world in a nuclear age we were pitted against the Soviet Union for dominance of space. Our Space Race was no challenge of ego or simple scientific bragging. It was war. He who could launch rockets to space could surely drop nuclear weapons from there too, and we were behind — very behind. The Soviets were beating us on every measure and most notably were the first to put a man in space.
So President Kennedy set an audacious challenge, a seemingly unachievable one for which the science and solutions were not yet created or understood. He said we would send a man to the moon and bring him back safely by the end of the decade. It was brave and bold considering we didn’t know how we would do it. But it harnessed the talents of diverse people, lead to a focus on experimenting our way forward and created a clear goal which less than 10 years later landed two men on the surface of our next closest celestial object. Today we call these challenges — those that are audacious and bold, that set a horizon beyond what our current reality deems feasible — Moonshots.
The term is now used by a few brave and bold change making companies in the world — including the one that is probably connecting your phone right now. Google’s Project X team is tasked with solving big challenges where the solutions are not yet viable, but with some effort, building on new technologies, and trends, they find a way forward. In their portfolio is Project Loom, which has balloons high above Puerto Rico at this moment, connecting our phones. They also look to deliver packages by drone and make a totally automated transportation system. I met Astro Teller this year, the head of Project X, and the thing that most struck me was when he said:
“It’s often easier to make something 10 times better than it is to make it 10 percent better.”
What he tells us is that when you leave behind your fears of change, you give yourself permission to invent and change your destiny.
OUR REAL CHALLENGE IS LEARNING TO INNOVATE
The real challenge behind our moonshot will be less about discovering new comparative advantages to build our economy on but about having the courage to transform and then knowing how to do it. You see, transformation is about innovation. And innovation is an act of bravery. And it is not easy. Innovation is today’s business survival truth. If you do not innovate today you are replaced tomorrow. Companies with legacies of over 100 years have gone bankrupted because they could not accept this truth. Large industries find themselves under attack from small, agile and aggressive startups who out innovate them to a new business model. But, despite this truth, too many in business, non-profits and governments do not innovate because they are both afraid of the unknown and do not have the skills.
I know the power and challenges of innovation. It has been my job for over 15 years. As the Driver of Culture and Innovation for Red Bull I had to deliver first to world ideas including getting a man to parachute from space — from 24 miles above the earths surface. Today, I help companies here in PR innovate their way forward, find new solutions and build new capabilities. And every step of the way is hard and not without it’s risks.
THE OLD WAY
The biggest mistake we can make is to try to innovate using the wrong method. Businesses and governments want something assured, a clear plan that takes out all the uncertainty, calculates all the numbers. They see the Marshall Plan and think we can predict the future and simple decide what will happen. But the world is very different. Things change much faster, technologies you invest in today are obsolete tomorrow. And too often governments assume they know what citizens want, make huge investments in this false or changing assumptions only to find a few years down the road that their millions were invested in things that people never needed or wanted in the first place.
The old way is like the Soviet 5 year plans that tried to control the uncontrollable, predict what could not be predicted an stick to one route no matter what changes occur. And we see how that turned out. But this is how governments often work today — big assumptions projected into the future means risky bets on unknown variables. It leaves no room for adaptation, creativity or learning.
AN INNOVATION MANIFESTO
But there is a better way. A way to deal with the uncertainty and constantly changing landscape. Rather than a top-down document crafted by government appointed experts we need a plan we craft together, that both gives us clear direction while allowing us to adapt to things we cannot yet predict and that allows us to harness talents of people not always included in these national strategy gatherings. A document that prescribes one singular outcome and that pretends to predict our path over 10 or 20 years is a recipe for failure and ignores how true innovation is delivered today.
This modern approach to innovation can be seen in the way Google, Apple, Virgin, SAP innovate. But it is also now used by many governments like the UK, Sweden, New Zealand and Singapore to rapidly innovate around a national agenda. You see, innovation has a method and mindset that we can learn from. It comes from principles and practices found in Design where people have always had to deal with uncertainty while creating future things. And these are the things it promotes. In government it is often called Civic Design or Social Innovation but whatever the name it shares some key principles that we can learn from.
START WITH A SHARED VISION
In Psalms it says “Without vision the people are lost.” Great transformation, great new leaps of innovation, take a vision much like JFK and the moonshot. But that vision should not be prescriptive, predicting exactly what industry we might be in or what things we will invest in. Instead it should define a future we wish to achieve while leaving us the room to discover how we will get there. A vision for Puerto Rico might talk about resilience, becoming a first world center of sciences, about transparency in government, sustainable and renewable power systems, healthcare parity with the best nations in the world. The point is to set an audacious goal that allows us the the room to discover how we get there. And it should challenge us not to just copy best practices, but to also create the next practices others seek to follow.
This vision must include the perspective of not just our political, business and academic elite but also the voices of “el pueblo”. In order to create a vision for the future of Scotland public policy teams went out and help writing sessions and solicited anyone in the country to write in their hopes and dreams for the future of the nation. These letters where shared with teams crafting a vision as data relevant for anyone wanting to understand what everyday people dreamt of for their kids.
INCLUDE OTHER IN THE PROCESS
The old way of innovation says to get just the experts and allow them to create a plan. But innovation today is about building solutions upon the insights found from those we serve. In the world of Civic Design, where governments treats citizens as customers of services, we seek to not just hear the customer, but to co-create with them. Municipalities in England, Chile and New Zealand have created civic laboratories like Chile’s Labratorio de Gobierno where citizens, business leaders, non-profits and movement leaders work side by side to understand the problem, create solutions and test them together. This radical collaboration leads to better, more diverse solutions that build upon real insights from those that will both benefit and deliver them.
As we create solutions on the island we should also look for solutions from outside Puerto Rico. We have already seen people like Elon Musk bring his talents to our problems. But there are so many more people on the edge of the future desperate to showcase what they can do. Imagine Puerto Rico holding events in London, San Francisco, Tel Aviv to tap into the mind of great people talking about digital governance, water production and healthcare solutions.
UNLEASH CREATIVITY AND GO BOLDLY
Innovation depends on us allowing ourselves to think beyond what seems reasonable. Creativity can be found in all of us and needs to be harnessed to find new ways to solve old problems. Under stress people tend to offer ideas that fall sort of our transformation ambitions. Conservative, mediocre and half-step ideas are tempting because they seem less risking than something more radical and untested. But like Astro Teller at Google says, the only way we will really make change is if we are willing to consider the outlandish, near foolish, creative ideas that break with what others are already doing.
To do this we need to encourage people to push beyond standard solutions and imagine Puerto Rico as a world class standard in things from electrical production, government efficiency to education. We need to be asking “how might we solve this problem in a way that no one else has thought of?” And in the spirit of including others including those from outside of Puerto Rico what might be possible if we were to launch a worldwide challenges — and x prizes — for people who bring us the best new ideas to address our challenges?
EXPERIMENT FORWARD TO OVERCOME FEAR
But new ideas are risky and people shy away at the slightest prospect of failure. Often innovative ideas are resisted at first. Other times organizations and governments fall in love with one single idea and hedge all their bets against them, only to find out that it will fail in the end. Innovators know better. They allow for experiments and understanding by allowing several ideas or scenarios to move forward quickly with small amounts of funding. This way they will find what works and learn from what does not. In the world of innovation, these failures are simply learnings. If done quickly, with small investments, they do not cripple the organization but instead reduce the risk of big, costly failures.
Consider the Ignite program and the US Department of Health and Human Services that allows for dozens of designed ideas to be tried in different hospitals across the nation with investments ranging from $25 — $100K in order to find what resonates. By allowing people from all over the nation to try out their ideas around how to deliver better, more efficient and affordable heathcare in small, often 1 week to maybe two month experiments they are avoiding investing in one big “theoretical) idea that might take 2 years to get going and yet still fail. They are encouraging people to fail fast (and cheaply) so they can learn quickly what works and what doesn’t. Imagine a fund set up to allow teachers in our schools to test ideas that would lead to solutions for our educational challenges with a window of 3–4 weeks to deliver back results instead of the decades of over investing n costly solutions that don’t work.
CREATE EXTREME TRANSPARECY
Great innovators make their actions transparent — creating national score cards that all can see and that hold not just government accountable, but also civic society is essential. Look at Ireland who set out a goal to drive growth through innovation and measure every step of the way on a publicly viewable site. They admit their successes and failures. Or look at New York City or San Francisco who have open data portals that allow citizens to see and even use all the data the government produces; sometimes to find where government is inefficient, sometimes to create solutions for citizens and also to hold leaders accountable.
Here in Puerto Rico we have people who are trying to deliver just these kinds of solutions. By combining the power of digital platforms and bringing in volunteers several initiatives have tried to help government use it’s data better and share it with citizens eager to help solve the problems. Abre Puerto Rico is just one example of a group using the data of government to rank municipalities.
BIAS TOWARDS ACTION
Finally, innovators have a bias towards action. They promote a culture of moving fast, trying things, not turning initiatives into never ending committees or meetings that deliver talking points, but instead substantive deliverables in the matter of months, not years. This requires us to unleash potential at all levels of society — within government and within civic society. It means allowing people to move forward by reducing bureaucratic hurdles.
We must innovate our way forward using design principles and amplifying our solutions with a digital economy. We must resist the temptation to go back to what we are used to and instead become comfortable with uncomfortable feeling of doing new, brave and innovate things. I have worked on the forefront of design driven innovation and I know we are capable in achieving this with our immense pool of talented Puerto Ricans both here and living abroad.
I am optimistic we can do this. And I am optimistic that you will play a critical, catalytic role in reimagining, designing and delivering the Puerto Rico we have always wanted and that we have always suspected was possible. Within our history is a core of resiliency matched with creativity that imagines things that do not yet exist, convince others that it is possible, bring together people to develop that idea into a plan and then apply the discipline and hard work to bring it to life. From nothing to something — that is what we once did and will do again. And that is what Puerto Rico needs. The only other ingredient needed is courage — the courage to innovate, to imagine, to design, to collaborate and to believe in a greater Puerto Rico.
(Photo from Facebook. We wish we knew who took it because it so captures what we have been through.)
