Zag To The Zig :: #8
Without further ado(om)…
…this week, we start in the Tech Room
Talking about Zagging when everybody Zigs. Tom Scott is a tech journalist/YouTuber (2m subscribers). When he got asked by a VPN company to make an ad/product plug for them, he said yes. But, as he does know his tech stuff, he did debunk a few myths about VPN. Result: sponsor ≠ happy.
Boy, it must be fun to be a scientist. These guys are working on a type of generator that creates energy from the night (something called radiative cooling). Who needs solar panels?
Crypto *can* tap into convenience it seems. At a recent data conference, the organisers gave everyone a ‘burner wallet’ with event tokens (aka crypto). One learning: people love playing with that silly-money (they donated 10k to charity). But more interesting: the transaction costs to make all of the 19456 transactions came to 1,54$. The organisers claim that in the normal world that would have cost them 4000$. While 4k sounds a little over the top, a dollar and a half to settle 20 thousand transactions is very little indeed.
In the Economy room
This kind of stuff tickles my curiosity bones big time. Organisation design meets blockchain meets law. OpenLaw has set up a legal structure, allowing the weird-and-mildly-anarchic DAO governance structures to be plugged into into American corporate law.
At the same time, the German government published a paper outlining their blockchain strategy “for the token economy”. Less DAO-thinking, more ‘we want to be the leader’, but still: I do think it’s worth exploring, as an alternative to the organisation models that result in the item below.Interesting piece on the downsides of platform economies. Not from an investor doubting his/her returns on a WeWork IP0, but from a millennial-ish journalist. The end of the Millennial Lifestyle Sponsorship.
“I don’t know if it makes sense, and I don’t know how long it’s going to last”
Wow. Microsoft Japan experimented with a 4-day work week and reported a 40% increase in sales. Nice detail: they provided subsidies for activities such as course tuition, family travel and athletics. 🏃♀️
The ethics/fairness room
Flickr became a success by making their default setting ‘open’. That triggered the network effect. Now, the grey zones that come with that openness become clear. Because images of 700.000 people got included in MegaFace, a database used by lots of companies to train their face recognition algorithms. Striking: this was fairly common industry knowledge, but it’s starting to matter now.
In the tool shed
Another tool for co-creation. This time, from friend from ZTTZ Alejandro Masferrer (him of TriggerCards). Co-Creation Patterns is a guide to avoid the usual blind spots, errors, imbalances and threats that can obstruct the creative process in team dynamics.
Random ZTTZ
When in doubt, be cautious. Or not? When the Fukushima disaster happened, the Japanese government decided to switch off nuclear power stations. Common sense, one thinks. But a study found that the unintended consequence could well have been that up to 4500 people died from cutting down on heating due to soaring electricity prices.
🏁 End note: 1 thing I’ll be doing this week…
…I’m going to develop a course, Design Thinking on a Budget.
Why? Obviously, every company and organisation wants to be human/user/customer- centric. But not everybody had the in-house talent, nor can afford to hire consultants or agencies.
Over the years I have developed a day-to-day, let’s-stay-realistic version of Design Thinking, which turns out to very useful for teams. And affordable!!
So I’m going to turn that into some kind of (short) course. If this is something for you, or you know someone who might be interested, get in touch. I’d love to tweak it to people’s needs. Any input is welcome. ⌨️👉