POSITVE DEVIANCE I

Patenoster, South Africa

August 28, 2009

It was in the market in Patenoster, South Africa that Skye called out, ‘hey, papa come look at this cool thing!’ Fully expecting a troll, trinket, or other tacky tourist item to maneuver my 11 year old away from, I was surprised to find colorful boxes made out of the bottoms of 1 liter coke bottles. Instead of recycling, or throwing them away, this woman had masterfully cut the the bottles in such a way that they would close. In order to make them pretty, she had taken napkins and glued them on in such a way as to make them sturdy and translucent so the light could shine through. And at 12 Rand – approximately $1.50 USD – they weren’t expensive.

She did a brisk business, so we were lucky to get one. She’ll make more tonight and be back tomorrow at 11am next to the dried fish, shell mobiles and other brickabrack.

Holding this thing, which I don’t know exactly what we’ll do with as we continue our road trip north into places wild and unknown, I started to think about principles. What are the common elements of projects that might make up an instance of positive deviance?

• Sustainable Value – it adds demonstrable value to multiple stakeholders – including the shareholder – and importantly, doesn’t take away value from other people, communities and nature. In simple terms, an instance of positive deviance should do no harm and bring value to many. In the case of the little box, she was making decent money on a ubiquitous item that was heading to a landfill, incinerator or energy intensive recycling plant.
• Cost Effective – the economics must make sense at scale within the communities in which they operate. In other words, it could work at scale and isn’t simply for the wealthy or extreme niche. If ‘sustainable’ cotton (or pick your commodity) can’t compete with ‘conventionally’ grown cotton, it won’t make a difference. At 12 Rand, these sturdy boxes were accessible even to the local fishermen, and were an absolute bargain to tourists. I could easily imagine thousands of these being made all over the world.
• Beauty – the direct outcomes and unintended impacts of the product or service should somehow enhance the richness and diversity of nature and society. If things add economic value and do no harm, but they detract systematically from diversity or beauty, then in the long run they won’t make the cut. My market entrepreneur didn’t need to add the napkins to the coke bottle boxes. They would work have worked without them just fine. But it was that extra move to thoughtfully bring beauty along with the practical innovation that make it appealing, and led to its being snapped up like hot cakes.

These may not be right, but it’s a good northstar to start.

WILD ECONOMY

September 9, 2009
Kgalagadi Transfrontier National Park
Ten lions, a dominant male, two females, five cubs and two young males nearby, rest in the afternoon heat. The male Kalahari Desert lions are known for their flowing, dark, beautiful manes, which grow fuller than most due to the lack of vegetation and underbrush. It’s hot, dry and primal out here in this bright African afternoon. The cubs rough-house, chew on sticks and nurse; the dominant male lazily sits up to survey his domain; the mamas nap only moving to stay in the shade; and the young males shift restlessly to survey the main pride to which they hope to have access someday. Mostly they all sleep.
They pay us no mind even though we’re but 20 feet away for two hours in the 35 degree heat. A few german tourists in self-drive 4x4’s toting massive cameras and lenses come and go. Still we sit, sweating yet mesmerized by the spectacle of wild lions in this wild place.
Like the Germans, we are on a self-safari in this remote game park on the border between Namibia and South Africa. We are in a rented Kia Sportage bound from Cape Town to the Angola/Namibia border and have our own small array of electronic recording devices (not too much: remember our carry-on provision), and are in the process of surveying two dry river valleys where the game collect from Twee Riverien to Nossob and over to Mata-Mata searching. Watching the King of Beasts playfully swat an frisky cub, it occurs to me that our ‘market economy’ means nothing to these wild creatures. They are affected by markets surely; but they know and care nothing of them. For them life just is.
In contrast, I live, observe lions in Africa, and am able to write this by virtue of my active participation in market economies. What’s especially interesting about Africa is that there are fair numbers of people who, like the Kalahari lions, are influenced by market forces, but as a practical matter they know and care little about them. For a good portion of humanity life is still pretty basic – living moment by moment hunt for food, shelter, sex, and harmonized social relations. And this is an economy of sorts – a wild economy. It’s older, more raw and as I gaze at the lions, realize isn’t going away anytime soon. Market economies are a structure of human interpretation with agreed to rules and norms; wild economies are somehow different.
In New York I met with folks from Millennium Promise, an NGO committed to eradicating extreme poverty consistent with the UN’s Millennium Development Goals. In early October Marci, Skye and I will visit one of their projects in Malawi to explore how to develop markets for agricultural goods in communities with no infrastructure and no investment capital. Theirs is a problem of transitioning people from a wild economy to a market economy. According to Millennium Promise there are one billion people living in extreme poverty world-wide. That’s a lot of people living close to wild economics. I’ve grown up in market economics – I know nothing else – and the last 5 years have looked deeply into the unintended impacts – good and bad – of markets. What I’ve learned is there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Participation in the global economy has clear benefits, but also its costs. And because it works on human-created rules, one has to choose to participate in order to make it work. Thus I suspect that this is why most ‘aid’ fails and why the WTO will continue to have challenges. Ultimately, people must choose to participate in markets; to let go of the wild, ancient and raw – with all its benefits and costs – and embrace the new.
And as I sit, sweat and commune with the Kalahari lions I can almost see a kind of picture into that wild human economy. But not quite.

We are on our way to the Kalahari and then into Namibia. More posts coming soon when we get reconnected. Its a long road.

BORDER LAND

BORDER LAND

August 22, 2009

Airport Transit Lounge, Frankfurt, Germany

The experience of leaving one country, but not yet fully arriving in another country is odd. It is a zone of no-country, a place between the known and unknown, a domain of uncertainty and anticipation, an experience of being and becoming. Its unsettling.

When I was 23 years old, I lived outside of Livingstone, Zambia in a one room thatched roofed hut at the Rainbow Lodge within view of the hippo and crocodile laden Zambezi River and Musi O Tunya – the smoke that thunders – Victoria Falls. After widening to over a mile and plunging almost 500 feet over the world famous Falls, the Zambezi then snakes its way 200 km down the remote and desolate Batoka Gorge home to the world’s rarest falcon, the world’s biggest navigable rapids, and one of the world’s most natural borders. In 1985 and 1986 I was one of seven whitewater river guides working for Sobek, the company that had done the first descent of the river two years before (it was on the seven day expedition where I met my sweet wife Marci, but that is another story). Just below the Falls, within walking distance from my hut, the top of the gorge is almost a ½ mile across and with the churning river 500 feet below, it forms the border between Zimbabwe and Zambia. In 1985, Zambia was poor and Zimbabwe was not. Petrol, bread, cheese, meat - almost everything - needed to be purchased in Zimbabwe. To do this, we needed to cross a big bridge, checking out of Zambia on one side, driving across the bridge often getting out to admire the view, and then checking into Zimbabwe on the other side. In 1985 given what we were doing, it was not totally clear if once you checked out of one country, whether or not they would let you into the other one. I used to imagine living on that bridge between two African countries, stuck forever in the borderland where none of the old or new rules applied. A developing world version of that movie Tom Hanks starred in not too long ago where he was stuck for months inside JFK.

Of course, that never happened. There were unsettling incidents: normally placid guards made irritable by 120 degree heat and our sloppy misprints in paperwork pulling our bread, cheese and provision laden land rover apart, fines and threats to take passports because of undeclared wheels of cheese; subtle but firm pressure for bribes. But we always made it out the other side.

As we sit physically in Germany, legally nowhere, bound for Southern Africa, a country so far away it will take us 32 hours of travel to get there, where we will drive 2000km up the west coast of South Africa and Namibia to near the Angolan border, I see how we are in collective and individual borderlands in our lives – walking across a bridge between the known and unknown. Skye most obviously of all. She bravely walks in the border land between childhood and puberty, between fantasy and ‘reality’, between reliance on parents and self-reliance. She has so much trust and resolve. We have been on the road for over 4 weeks in Bug-Z and not once has she complained despite all manner of circumstance – breakdowns, boring dinners with adults, heat, rain, being lost, no friends, and hours and hours of loud diesel engine drone. Skye is pretty much content to be here with us come what may. Marci has wrapped up all of her design projects, closed her business bank account, and for the first time since we’ve been together is unencumbered by projects and the numerous details she masterfully manages everyday. She is free. As for me, the everyday routine followed faithfully for the last five has disappeared. Building Blu Skye, obsessively serving our clients, innovating to raise the game, being a small part of a growing movement to transform the way business is conducted on planet earth – all the structure and devices that have allowed me to do this are gone. And as I stare out the transit lounge window waiting for our flight to Cape Town, I realize that when we return home, it will all be different. For me and for all of us.

Now I know why people don’t choose to do a trip like this more often. Its unsettling, unclear and unnerving. Its also what creates the possibility for something new to emerge. We often tell our busy clients that once the analysis is done, strategy consists of only three tangible things. Those current actions which you will Stop; future actions that you will Start; and current actions that you will Continue. The hardest, by far, is stopping. But this is the only place where the opening for new action is created. We’ve all stopped a lot of actions and are engaged in a whole lot of new actions. It will be interesting to see what happens when we emerge from this border land.