Unleash Lab 2017 - My six key takeaways
I’m writing today from San Francisco. I’m finally back in town, going through a long debrief that will help me sort out the main clusters and paths to follow after my Unleash Lab 2017 experience. It was intense: rich of remarkable people, impressive content, profound inspiration and useful working tools. Now, it’s time to make some order.
Here some of the personal learnings I took away from this experience.
ONE. It is not about success and failure, it is about showing up.
Across the 10 days together, the 1000 of us were split in different themes (Food, Water, Urban Sustainability, Energy, Sustainable Consumption, ICT & Education and Health). On Monday each group moved to a different Folk High School, where we stayed until Saturday morning.
Yes, the key word here is Folk Hight School.
The idea of the Folk High Schools emerged in the 1830s. The founding father was Grundtvig — a Danish theologian, writer, philosopher, historian, educationist and politician. Grundtvig identified the growing need in society of enlightening the often both uneducated and poor peasantry. The aim of the Folk High School was to help people qualify as active and engaged members of society. By singing, reading and exploring the surroundings, the students were meant to both have an amusing time and obtain educational knowledge. A large variety of subjects were offered and exams were prohibited.
These places still exist and I lived there (to be precise, I lived at Ry Folk High School) over 5 days. We sang every morning and evening, we canoed, we swam in the lake, we did yoga at night, we had three amazing meals a day while effectively working in teams on our projects. The atmosphere was one of the most peaceful, productive and focusing I’ve ever had. The director was an inspiring character, never missing the chance to show his passion and willingness to give. He told us that exams were not needed there.
Our exam is showing up : whatever we do in life, the most important step to accomplish is taking the decision of going for it. There is not “passed or failed”: in any case we will learn something if just we decide to take the risk of showing up.
TWO. Invest in a fluid education.
At the human level, the period at the Folk High Schools was surely one of the most enriching one. The Danish Folk High Schools today offer non-formal adult education to students between 18 and 24 years old. The concept of “Non-formal adult education” starts from two main ideas. Educational growth and economic growth are not necessarily in steps and jobs have been showing not to emerge directly as a result of educational inputs.
This proves a clear need to shape a more fluid educational system. There is the necessity to provide more experiential educational programs, able to go out of the structured system, focusing on developing personal skills and more integrated in the real world flows.
According to OECD 2014 Report, education is below average in terms of product or service innovation. Just knowing the number of applications Unleash received, the requests our Food Innovation Program received, or the number of Singularity University Alumni, it seems obvious that the need is there: it is just matter of investing in it.
THREE. We need more human centred innovation.
During the ten days I had the chance to speak a couple of times with Henrik Skovby, Executive Chairman and Founder of Dalberg. Dalberg was definitly one of the best surprises of my Unleash Lab. It is one of the few strategy and policy advisory firm that specialises in global development, focusing on actually making an impact. With their support, we worked on designing our solutions in order to engage people, communities and organisations in proposals able to effectively have an impact on the 17 SDG.
Working following a design thinking approach always makes me feeling really good.
As it happened during the Food Innovation Program, we have been using a series of great tools that led us through the whole project development. The UNLEASH Innovation Process was developed in 5 phases: Problem Framing, Ideation, Prototyping, Testing, and Implementing. Our goal across the days we spent at the Folk High Schools, was to advance our ideas and solutions through the innovation process, ultimately leading to the implementation of solutions that could eventually help address the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
What was interesting here, was the presence of 3 extra elements.
Gates: To move between phases, we had to go through a gate. Each gate had a list of tasks to be completed or questions to be answered. Without the full checklist completed, we couldn’t go for the following phase.
Progress checks: Everyday we had two progress check with our facilitators. Facilitators remained the same during the process and they were fundamental for feedbacks, focus points and warnings.
Peer feedback sessions: There were 10 minutes presentation done to other Unleashers who were working on something completely different.
The tools reminded me a great quote I noted down the first day: “Innovation is not a technological issue. It is about people, knowing what they want and why, in order to improve their lives”
FOUR. We need to look at precision farming in developing countries.
During the 4 days of team project, I jumped on an interesting challenge: farming in developing countries. Our team was composed by 5 amazing people from literally all over the world.
Sabina, from Australia; Ivana, from Bulgaria, EU and living in Dubai; Suman, from Nepal and living in Thailand; Ranjita from Nepal; myself, from Italy, Europe and living in California, US.
Our focus point was on smallholder crop farmers in developing countries, especially in Africa and South East Asia. Why? Part of the group had experience in those areas, seeing a big constraint. At the moment it is hard to take optimal agricultural decisions due to the lack and inaccessibility of information, which results in low productivity and inefficient output. In those areas agriculture accounts for almost two thirds of livelihoods and food for two-thirds of spending.
I jumped into the well know World Bank website, and I saw once again how much there is still to be done in those areas: more than half of the world has a GDP per capita which doesn’t get to 16000$/year. There are almost 60 counties in this area with less than 2000$/year in GDP. Farmers are here the core of the community and they are not able to increase their productive potential of output. There is work to be done.
FIVE. Build legacies.
As a team, we started working on a solution that is building up on the project Suman has been researching on for a long time. The project we designed is called Skye.
It is a low-cost precision agriculture camera helping farmers increase productivity through better agricultural practice decisions. It is a transition and gap-filling technology in form of a modified, lightweight camera attached to a helium, biogas or hot-air filled balloon taking aerial photos of cropped land. These images are processed by a small processor, or network, which compute a vegetation index (NDVI) to provide a visual health map of the farm. The map shows vegetation health not visible by manual inspection. This gives control and ability to act during pre-harvest, and pre-empts issues, before they are too late to address. Examples of decisions are crop distribution, critical for mix-crop plots and crops where density has a significant impact on yield, targeted fertiliser use, decreasing overall use of chemical fertilisers.
The secret sauce we see here is the camera really low costs as well as the fact of skipping the drone technology (an advantage in terms of cost and especially, in terms of regulation for the countries where drones are not allowed) as the target users do not actually requires this technology at the moment.
This process has been showing me strengths and weaknesses of this type of educational initiatives. We worked a lot, we developed new skills, we increased our personal network and we put our hands on something new. I learned concepts, I became aware of problems and stories, I met interesting people who nourished my willingness to become a better human being, entrepreneur and executer.
And now? Suman will keep on working on that as part of his own university research. We, as a team, we’ll continue to support him and try to find next opportunities to present the work. Honestly, if we can manage to have the push we need to move it forward, I’ll be totally on it!
Our challenge here, is to create and maintain this legacy. This is the hard job Unleash has to deal with right now I believe — and when I say Unleash I mean all of us, the founding class which is “filling this shiny structure” that the organisation just built up for us. We should be able to work remotely as a team, get access to capital and partnerships, have a running pilot and give our contribution to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals.
SIX. Figure out what success means for each of us.
And at the end of the day: what is success? Even if I started saying that we shouldn’t focus just on success and failure, we ultimately need to internally measure what we are doing.
I am personally intrigued by this concept, and I’ve been reading quite a lot on the topic. A funny exercise I love to do is to go through different great leaders opinions in term of success, and put it in scale. The final goal: always show up and find my perfect metrics to measure how it went.
Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington says that money and power aren’t enough.” To live the lives we truly want and deserve, we need a Third Metric, which consists of four pillars: well-being, wisdom, wonder, and giving.”
I really like the vision of John Wooden, which sees success as a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing we did our best to become the best we are capable of becoming.
A funny interpretation of success was given by Churchill that, given the times he was living (I suppose) had a pretty negative viewpoint: ”Success is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm”.
Well, Henrik tried to frame success in the Unleash context and he said “Success means that in 5 years from now, an Unleasher, a mentor, an expert, will pick up the phone and call you asking for your support. This will mean that you showed your value across time so badly that someone from the community will immediately think about you once looking for people to involve in a new project.” I see the point here and I think it has its sense actually.
In my vision success means first of all being able to give and impact, being fulfilled and self-satisfied by doing it. Eventually, success means being able to work towards those directions without felling the “job burden”, and being able to afford a comfortable level of lifestyle that doing it.
Well, not easy at all, but let’s try to start by showing up! ;)
