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This material is the result of a line of inquiry that started with me trying to learn the craft of graphic recording. Graphic recording involves listening to group conversations, then using visuals to model the content and connections as they emerge.
Spending an inordinate amount of time in the workplace listening as a professional activity - and, in many cases, feeling as though I was the only person in the room that was actually listening - I found myself starting to wonder why some conversations were so easy and enjoyable to model, and why some were so frustrating and painful. As I tried to represent not just the content of the conversations, but also the meaning, I started to wonder about the structure of meaning, and how it gets created between people.
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Some conversations seemed so productive, with new and exciting ideas coming out of the back-and-forth, while others went in circles. I couldn’t help but wonder: why? What was the difference? As my practice shifted more towards facilitation, I found that the muscles I had trained in listening became one of the most valuable parts of my practice.
A few years ago, I wrote a small guide on how to begin training yourself to be a better listener. It was too short to be a book, but it is too long to be a post, and has, instead, just languished in the deep recesses of my hard drive. I’ve chosen to post it all here as a short series, as I have never felt so acutely that we all might benefit from taking a moment to really listen to one another. Hearing each other is not good enough. We need to really listen.
Why Listen
Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, Sapiens has thus been living in a dual reality. On the one hand, the objective reality of rivers, trees and lions; and on the other hand, the imagined reality of gods, nations and corporations.
Since large-scale human cooperation is based on myths, the way people cooperate can be altered by changing the myths - by telling different stories.
Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari
Our success as a species has been built on our ability to create a shared understanding of reality - to craft a sense of meaning that exists only in our minds, and not in the world around us. Our capacity to communicate our thoughts and ideas with each other allows us, as individuals, to expand beyond what it is possible to experience in a single lifetime.
Through listening we can assimilate the wisdom of others. We can absorb entire lifetimes of experience. We can experience parallel experiences, infinite “what-ifs” and variations on our own chosen path.
Or not.
We are taught to lead, to inspire, to tell compelling narratives, to “fake-it-till-we-make-it”, to add value, to engage, find our voice, win people over and take space. But what happens if we all do that?
A group of people on broadcast-mode is trapped in a kind of social-dysfunction that undermines the very power that has gotten our species to where it is today. Listening enables us to extend beyond ourselves and tap into a collective conscience that is available to all of us, but accessible only to those who consciously choose to do so.
Whether you believe neuroscientists, Daniel Kahneman or Gautama Buddha, we are locked in our own heads interacting with faded and faulty representations of the world around us, and only rarely the world itself. We live in our own mental models.
Daniel Kahneman’s important work on mental function showed that our early life is spent building a set of representations of the world around us - mental models - that allows us to navigate the world in a very low-energy-consuming way of being that very much resembles auto-pilot. He calls this System 1 thinking. We spend most of our time in System 1 thinking, following our mental models’ idea of what the world is, rather than responding to the world itself.
We only access System 2 thinking when we encounter dissonance with our expected results, at which point our full mental faculties are “switched on” to figure out what is happening.
When we spend all our time talking, we generally stay locked within our own representations of the world. Reflexive listening is what we most often do - waiting for an auditory stimulus that triggers us to make a culturally, contextually and situationally appropriate response. “How are you today?”, “How will you be paying?”, “What are you up to this weekend?”, “So what do you do?” all trigger near-automatic responses. Try answering randomly - in many cases, people will often ask you to repeat yourself, as though they hadn’t actually even heard the response, or will become flustered, confused, or annoyed. This is what finding the edges of a mental model looks like.
We live our lives in layer after layer of mental models, some conscious, many unconscious, from how we walk down stairs, to how we structure our tasks to who we believe ourselves to be.
So why listen?
Deeply listening to others can allow us to challenge the limits of our own assumptions, biases and mental models to learn from the experiences of others and become more than only ourselves.
Deeply listening can also be a profound act of service to others, unlocking their own constraints and boundaries by creating a space between you that is more than either of you.
Ways of Listening
When we interact with others, we are aware that there is probably more to that person than just the interaction we are having. Sometimes we interact with just the representation people put out. Sometimes we interact more with the context we are in than the person - the roles we play, whether it is a server in a restaurant, or a colleague at work. The iceberg metaphor comes up so often because we know that beneath the surface, there is more than just the context, and more than just the representation or projection of a person in front of us.
Let’s be honest; we use roles and mental models because accessing our full faculties all the time is exhausting. Part of the path of Buddhism is to free yourself of all the models - assumptions, beliefs, ideas of other and self - that shroud the the world around us from our view.
But that’s kinda hard.
One simple “hack” to start on the path of deeper listening is to substitute an explicit model for how to approach the conversation for all the implicit ones rattling around in our heads that we might not be aware of.
Over the next few posts I will share some models that you can use as a way of thinking about why you are listening, as a way of tuning your ear, and directing your inquiry.
It’s easy to get lost in the details of a conversation, or be in a rush, or be thinking of everything you have to do, and forget about what the purpose of the conversation is. And, when I say purpose of the conversation, I’m trying to set a higher bar. I’m advocating for a purpose that is beyond simply being transactional, and that is part of the assumptions built into the models I’ll be sharing.
In a series of posts, which I will add links to here as they go live, we will explore the use of listening to transform a network, to build community, to shift a system, to build a relationship, to reframe a problem, or to create something new. Each has a different model you can use as a listening lens.
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I’ve had a few requests on where to get started to develop a practice in graphic facilitation, so I thought I would write my response here instead of firing off a few links.
I still remember walking into my first MGTaylor environment and seeing a krew member scribing on the whiteboards. The first thing I noticed was that she was writing in a font. She was capturing what a group was saying, as they were saying it. When I asked her afterwards if she knew what they were going to be saying beforehand, she just shrugged, and said she just listens and lets it flow. I was awestruck, and knew that if we got to choose which role we would do, I wanted to do that.
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A lot of people seem to have the same reaction when they see graphic facilitation for the first time, but as I’ve seen the practice become more common, I’ve also seen a lot of drift, and a much wider range of practice into some that is more utility-focused, and some that seems mostly aesthetic.
If you'd like some more context and background on what graphic facilitation is and where it comes from, I suggest you read this great post by Christopher Fuller. I'm grateful that he wrote it, so I can avoid writing that context and get down to answering the question of how to get started.
This post is for anyone hoping to take visual notes either for themselves, or in a group setting. While I use these techniques in workshops all the time now, as a side note, this is a skill I wish I had when I was in college. Oh, the notes I would have had!
The most useful distinction I found early on in trying to learn scribing was made by Tony Buzan in "The Mind Map Book" in which he differentiates between and . Note taking is capturing information uncritically, usually as it comes at you in time. It tends to be linear, and reflect the order in which information is presented. Note , by contrast, requires the listener to reflect on the meaning, structure and connectivity of information before recording it in order to capture it in a way that reflects the information at a conceptual level, as opposed to a strictly sequential level.
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Deep Dive: Why Crypto is So Polarizing
mercredi 29 janvier 2025 • Durée 27:07
Note: I started writing this before Trump and Melania launched their own memecoins, which really raised the stakes for everything I was trying to lay out - it validates for me how important it is for people to understand what is involved, and what is at stake, in the crypto space.
Policy moves slowly, tech moves quickly and finance moves in the shadows. I am always fascinated by the intersections of these worlds, and by the difficulty in making good decisions in the places where they overlap. Having policy keep up even with something as straightforward as ridesharing is a challenge, and it took years for the world to understand what was happening under the surface on Wall Street with CDOs.
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So crypto, which involves both a deep, obscure tech ecosystem wrapped in jargon and hype, and an intersection with financial services is ripe for policy chaos and poor decision making.
I believe that having the right questions sits at the heart of good decision making, and that, as it stands, we are so conditioned to ask the wrong questions about crypto that we are sleepwalking into a crisis.
The Problem with Crypto
I’ve been meaning to write this for some time, and the push that has finally made me do it was this article by Paul Krugman - the public economist and (formerly) NYTimes columnist - called “Crypto is for Criming”. It is infuriatingly elitist and dismissive, with a mocking image of Doctor Evil at the top driving home the point that this is a topic barely worthy of debate in polite society; it is, instead, the domain of “crypto bros” and criminals, rather than serious economists and investors.
So, then, one wonders, why would a Nobel Laureate feel the need to comment on it at all?
For context, I went “down the rabbit hole” on crypto and blockchain a few years ago when a colleague at a major tech company reached out because they were trying to evaluate whether blockchain technology would be a good choice for a particular challenge they were working on. She found that the answers she got from her peers were either cultishly supportive of blockchain, or vehemently dismissive, with little clear justification either way. I was intrigued, because there didn’t seem to be a clear way to evaluate the suitability of the technology for her particular use case, and the level of passion in the responses didn’t seem to correlate with any rational criteria.
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Design Thinking vs. Designing Thinking
vendredi 26 juillet 2024 • Durée 09:55
During a recent training I delivered for a group focused on supporting multi-stakeholder processes, I realized that there were a few missing steps needed to get them in the right headspace to explore some of the concepts we would be going through. Everything we were going to explore would be largely useless if they didn't first accept that a lot of the decisions they would have to make were part of a domain of design, and if they accepted that, that they needed some clarity on just what type of design we were talking about.
I think it's easy to accept that we can design a better car, a better app, or a better running shoe. When we can hold, touch and use something, we can imagine there was some care, some method to how someone designed all the elements that constitute the use and construction of that artifact.
But when it comes to the intangible, I have found that there is a leap of logic required for people to accept that there is the possibility of applying method to the design of an idea, an agreement, or a decision.
So, of late, I've found myself starting out any training by first making the case for design for those who find themselves in a situation where they work with other humans. The frame that I have found unleashes the most curious practitioners who follow down the most interesting paths of inquiry are those who imagine that their domain is not "design thinking," it is "designing thinking".
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In making the case for design, there is a kind of red pill/blue pill choice to be made for the practitioner. What it boils down to is this: given what we know about how humans behave, and what we have learned from psychology, economics, biology, sociology, history, anthropology and all of their many sub-domains and combinations, are there any factors that make outcomes in groups more or less likely, more often than not? Are there any patterns that can be identified among variables that might be isolated? Does one environment vs. another create a different outcome? One thought pattern vs. another? Could these patterns be abstracted, or modelled?
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Intent Is Everything
lundi 17 juin 2024 • Durée 07:34
When I first started doing facilitation and design work, it was almost always in the context of a single company or organization. They needed a collaborative process because they were generally large organizations, and the only way to make sure their strategy took into consideration all the necessary complexity they were facing was to bring in all the people with direct knowledge from the far-flung parts of the company. Not only did it make for more nuanced strategies, it also got a jump-start on rolling out the plan afterwards, as so many of the key people had a hand in building the strategy and were thus much more likely to be bought into it.
And that was the key challenge in those processes; finding a strategy or idea that was sufficiently compelling to enough people that they would actually want to do it. We always talked about how important it was to find that shared intent.
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What I didn't know then was how much easier it was to find shared intent in a process where most people were told they had to be there. Don't get me wrong; having your boss order you to be in a room doesn't automatically guarantee your buy in for whatever happens in that room. The reason so many large projects fail is that we consistently under-represent the impact of misalignment, misunderstandings, passive resistance and apathy. But as a starting point, having people who feel they at least need to show up, and feel they have at least something at stake in the outcomes is a decent place to start.
It wasn't until I started doing multi-stakeholder work that I realized just how important intent was. For those who are unfamiliar, multi-stakeholder work revolves around the many areas where people or organizations who don't necessarily have any responsibility or accountability to one another find themselves exploring an area in which they all have a stake or an interest. That might sound like a vague problem space, but it's actually where many of the biggest challenges facing civilization lie right now; the growing spaces and cracks in our systems that no individual actor has the knowledge, influence, resources, ability or mandate to tackle on their own.
Back in the easy days of working on smaller problems, bad faith actors in a collaborative process could face consequences from their boss. In a multi-stakeholder process, if a crucial stakeholder becomes bored and decides to drop out, there's no boss to compel them. They have to to be there, or feel they to be there.
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note taking
note making
making
Whatever style you end up choosing for how you represent information, if you pay attention to this difference, you'll immediately get a few benefits:
* Improved Memory: by taking the extra step of considering how pieces of information connect with one another, we switch our brains from passive consumption to active processing, which aids in our ability to recall that information later.
* Pattern Recognition: Actively listening and recording connections over time allows you to spot patterns and structure in the information, which can give you a second order of understanding in the content.
* Surfacing Meaning: Information on its own isn't necessarily useful, but as patterns emerge we can start to find new meaning in the flow. Depending on the amount of information and the length of time in which it is presented, that can easily outstrip our working memory - by visually structuring information as it comes, we can go beyond our cognitive "buffer" and find meaning in larger pools of information.
* Useful Reference: By creating a distinct visual structure that we associate with a time, place or conversation, we create a handy reference that we can use for later recall. Well structured visual notes can allow you to replay a conversation months and years later, creating a strong association with the moment they were captured.
These benefits apply both to when you use these techniques in your own notebook, but also when you use them to capture notes for a group on a whiteboard in a meeting. It is also worth noting that in a group setting, having a shared experience of those benefits can create a very positive dynamic on a collective conversation.
I would also say that each of those benefits should be applied as a kind of design principle for whatever style you choose to develop in your scribing. As graphic facilitation has become more popular as a profession, there has been a swing towards more form over function, where scribes create beautiful murals with little informational density or usefulness. Always ask yourself what the purpose is for the record that you are making, and be sure that the way that you are making that record will serve that purpose. I have actually found that my style has become more austere over time, as I focus on adding just enough beauty to trigger interest, but with an emphasis on the ideas that emerge and creating a record that will live beyond the moment in its usefulness.
So, on to where to get started. Accept that this is a journey, and that mastery will come slowly, but utility can come relatively quickly. There are a few dimensions you will need to consider as you develop, and I'll give some guiding questions for each in the interests of keeping this from getting too long. You'll need to work on technique, practice and structure.
Technique
There are some basic techniques involved in scribing, and these are what give learners the greatest amount of anxiety coming in. "But I can't draw!" is the usual refrain. While artistic talent never hurts, focusing on the basics will get you 80% of the benefit.
First, you need good lettering. There are lots of resources out there, but I'm biased towards lettering from architectural drafting. I learned old-school drafting in high school, and the discipline of that style has informed my lettering ever since. I found a great video here, which you can use as a starting point, but developing a legible, consistent style is an important baseline.
Along with great lettering, you’ll need some basic shapes, connectors and basic iconography. Graphic Facilitators Guillaume Lagane and Nicolas Gros did a great job of laying out hundreds of common objects in three levels of visual fidelity in this book, but you can find plenty of inspiration in comics and across the internet. If you’re in the “but I can’t draw!” camp, get some inspiration from books like Stickman Odyssey (the entire story of Homer’s Odyssey, illustrated with stickmen) or classics like Ed Eberly’s “Drawing Book of Animals” (did anyone else grow up with this?).
When in Doubt, Copy
There are so many talented graphic facilitators out there, it can help when you’re starting out to find someone with a style that you like and start out by trying to emulate their style. Some are illustration-heavy, some very text-based. Some use colour in novel ways and others are monochrome. Structure, hierarchy, layout all manifest differently in different styles, so it helps to look at what is out there and see what speaks to you. Some examples of practitioners that I admire (in no particular order, and also just based on who has some of their stuff online: Alicia Bramlett, Kelvy Bird, Guillaume Lagane, Alfredo Carlo & Housatonic, and Liisa Sorsa. There are so many others, but I’ve realized to my dismay that many of us don’t have much out there online - I’d be grateful if anyone sends me links to more that I can include here.
Practice
A common misperception is that good graphic recording is all about drawing. What many of us have found as we’ve tried to structure trainings around graphic recording, however, is that it is much more about listening and structuring information. I found a very old piece I wrote on the topic (2009!!) when I was working in parallel rooms with Sita Magnuson and Kelvy Bird. Between sessions, I took a peek at their work and realized that we were all representing what we heard in fundamentally different ways. It got me thinking about how we were engaging with what we heard, and how we structured that on the boards.
I have a lot of other materials that I’ll be formatting on to this Substack soon on developing a listening practice. Kelvy Bird has also published a great book on her approach called “Generative Scribing” that is worth a read.
I am aware that I am leaving so much out of this - this post has been a classic case of having so much that I want to include in it, that I get overwhelmed and put it off until I have more time to get it all in. Which never happens.
So, this is the starter pack. I welcome any other links or resources people want to send my way, and for my part, there are more detailed parts of this I’ll dive into at a later date, but here’s to a first draft seeing the light of day.
And you see this pattern reproduced in media and society more broadly - either people are fanatically supportive of “crypto”, or adamantly opposed to the “Ponzi scheme” that is only fit for money-launderers, drug dealers and gamblers.
I believe that ignoring what’s happening in this space is increasingly dangerous, not least because backers of the technology are now taking over its regulation in the US, and we’ve spent the last 5-10 years deliberately avoiding the real issues surrounding it.
Question #1: Who Wouldn’t Want to Use Crypto?
In Krugman’s article, he can only think of three possible explanations for the rise of crypto:
* Maybe it’s a digital asset, like virtual gold, so it’s uselessness is okay? (but he clearly doesn’t think so)
* Maybe it’s “all speculation or gambling…largely driven by testosterone”
* Maybe it’s just for “tax evasion…blackmail [and] money laundering?”
Krugman, like many others, are limited in their thinking from their starting premise that this is all rather ridiculous. The persistence of crypto is so insane, that the only possible explanation for its continued existence is that it enables shadowy crime syndicates and knuckle-dragging, UFC-obsessed, Trump-supporting gambling bros.
So, what is the original proposition of a cryptocurrency that is so insane? The original problem it was meant to solve?
“How do I quickly, securely and efficiently send money or to someone I don’t trust, without a middle-man?”
Have you ever tried to send money to someone? How was the experience? Was it quick? Was it cheap? Are you a criminal, or were you just trying to split a dinner bill?
Have you ever tried to send money between countries? How did you like the fees? Why did it take days to clear?
If I reframed cryptocurrency as “competition on financial infrastructure to allow open systems of peer-to-peer exchange”, then one thing becomes VERY clear; the people who wouldn’t want to use cryptocurrency would be those with a vested interest in the current financial infrastructure.
John Cassidy, with The New Yorker, wrote a fabulous article years ago just after the 2008 financial crisis, titled “What Good is Wall Street?” that is very instructive here. Going back to base-principles, he explores just what the role of financial services is supposed to be.
When the banking system behaves the way it is supposed to…it is akin to a power utility, distributing money (power) to where it is needed and keeping an account of how it is used. Just like power utilities, the big banks have a commanding position in the market, which they can use for the benefit of their customers and the economy at large.
Part of the thrust of the article explores how the financial services industry has gone from a public utility to a rent-seeker on the entire economy. If up to 25% of GDP is devoted just to a set of functions that could be automated…might there be some resistance?
Question #2: What Does Crypto’s Persistence Really Mean?
Suffice it to say, the regulatory environment for crypto has not been very easy. Bitcoin was routinely criticized by the Biden administration for its voracious appetite for energy, with threats to clamp down to protect the environment. When the #2 cryptocurrency changed protocols to make it more energy efficient (to the tune of 99% more energy efficient), the administration turned around and threatened its users because now it had become a security (it’s a long story). The Securities and Exchange Commission has routinely refused to provide any regulatory frameworks for crypto, but has instead approached the industry only through enforcement, that is, they would never say what was allowed, but would prosecute based on shifting versions of what wasn’t allowed. High profile disasters like the collapse of FTX were the predictable result of setting no regulations around an industry with billions of dollars flowing through it.
Which is all to say, there has not really been any strictly legal ways to experiment with cryptocurrencies. I’m struggling to think of any example of an industry with no rules or regulations that has grown to the size of the crypto space, which is, by today’s count, standing at 3.64 Trillion US dollars. That’s right. Trillion.
So what’s going on? What does that mean? If Krugman is right, are we really looking at $3.6T worth of testosterone and drug deals? Isn’t this all just a scam, and a Ponzi scheme?
I think that the single biggest risk that policy makers miss when looking at young crypto investors is not that stupid young men have been tricked into a Ponzi scheme, it’s this:
Most crypto investors don’t think that crypto markets are fair, just like the stock market; they believe it’s fixed, just like the stock market. The only difference is that everyone in crypto admits it’s fixed.
What this represents is a colossal, generational, and entirely rational, loss of faith in the traditional financial system. Young people feel shut out of the stock market, knowing that a very small group is capable of manipulating markets in ways that work to their benefit at the expense of “the rest”.
A lack of regulation, in that case, becomes a feature, not a bug, as regulators are seen only as protecting the interests and privileged access of the elite.
This couples with a second risk to create a systemically volatile combination:
Stagnant wages, high living costs and a bleak sense of the future means many young people don’t believe it is possible to enjoy the quality of life their parents had without some kind of game-changing windfall.
The social contract between generations and classes is breaking down, and the “rules of the game” seem more geared towards protecting the old and the rich than they are to keeping free and fair markets. Elite economists and commentators will mock a young generation focused on get-rich-quick schemes, while missing the fact that many don’t see how they could ever afford a house or a family without some kind of breakout. An investment that gets a steady return of 5% over decades won’t pay back student loans, medical bills and next month’s rent, but a sudden 1000x return on investment for some imaginary coin named after a dog or a cartoon frog might just pull them back from the brink. Why else would someone invest their child’s college fund in a coin named after an oral sex sound effect?
Just as many in the establishment were blindsided by Trump’s election victory because they missed out on how alienated and disenfranchised many in the country felt, they are once again going to miss the same dynamic playing out in financial markets.
Ironically, crypto markets as speculative investments seem to have emerged largely because a lack of regulation has prevented cryptocurrencies from fulfilling their original use case: paying for stuff. In fact, wildly fluctuating, volatile markets make cryptocurrencies largely unsuitable as a medium of exchange. Instead of a relatively stable “coin” spreading through its use in new and interesting applications, the technology is spreading through proliferation into new speculative assets (as of today, there are more than 2.4 million cryptocurrencies being actively traded).
Question #3: Does Crypto Signal Parts of a Future We Want?
A big part of the reason the crypto world lined up behind Trump was a total frustration with the SEC under Gary Gensler and the Biden Administration, which seemed hell bent on the destruction of the industry. You can charitably say that the hostility towards crypto came from a genuine concern for investor rights and the integrity of the financial system. You could also, less charitably, argue that the Biden administration was acting primarily in the interests of the financial services industry, which is facing its Napster Moment.
With the Trump administration coming in on promises of setting the crypto industry free of its shackles, it’s worth asking what the actual potential risks and benefits are, and what design challenges new regulations would have to solve for.
What amazes me is that as we collectively mock cryptocurrency and ask “what is it good for?”, we don’t question why the financial sector soaks up a quarter of global GDP for what is, essentially, plumbing. If that was our entry point, you might start the inquiry with questions like “what would a financial system look like if it was designed for a globalized, digital age?” From that frame, and realizing that this January, we are going to start seeing some very rapid movements in this space, here is what I think we should be paying attention to:
First, let’s accept that exchanges have all the dumb risks we’ve already solved over the last 250 years with banks and stock markets
Let’s get the stupid questions out of the way first. It’s frustrating to watch the same risks play out that we’ve already sweat blood over. People wanted to buy and sell crypto easily, but it’s distributed. So some people made a centralized place - an exchange - to trade them. But there were no rules. Would you let the NYSE trade against the market, giving themselves an edge? Would you let a bank say it has your money, but actually spend it all? Would you let the bank bet all your money on something for itself? No. We’ve already been through all this, but we thought that somehow, with billions at stake, that “trust me, bro” would work just fine. This is almost a copy/paste on regulations. It is also no small irony that so much of the risks in crypto emanate from centralization in exchanges, when the technology itself is based on decentralization.
Because the regulators have just been captured, we need to be clear on the stakes of the game…and what game we’re playing
The debate so far has been successfully contained to “what would you even use the internet for?” Advocates of cryptocurrency have been so insufferable that everyone’s eyes glaze over when it comes up, but we are in a situation where Biden decided that the entire future of money and global financial flows was not worth talking about, so now all of those rules will be set by Trump. There are three possible, not-mutually exclusive futures with their own implications.
The Bitcoin Future - Virtual Gold Standard & Digital Scarcity
In this future we decide that cryptocurrency is best seen as an asset, or commodity to be traded and held as a store of value. Many in the crypto industry have been fighting for the classification of cryptocurrencies as a commodity, because the bar for regulation is much lower, and the requirements for disclosure and reporting are much less stringent. In this case, a digital asset is bought and sold with no implied contracts or obligations.
Like gold, the asset is valuable because it is scarce and there are people who will pay for it. Scarcity, in this case, is created by the rules that are encoded in Bitcoin’s blockchain itself and the algorithmic limitations on how quickly new coins are added to the available supply.
In its own way, the idea that a Bitcoin has value is no less ridiculous than saying a small piece of paper has value; it does because we agree it does. What we should be asking is, what does this allow that other methods of exchange do not? If we treat it as a prototype for a new system, we can evaluate its features, rather than just dismiss it completely for ideological reasons.
Pros: It is digital, moveable, universal, decentralized (i.e. not controllable by any particular entity), scarce (value responds to demand), immutable (creates a permanent record), open.
Cons: It is volatile (thus making it inefficient for exchange), inherently energy inefficient (scarcity created by increasing energy consumption), immutable (you can’t change it, even if you want to), open (as criminals have found out, all transactions are public).
As you can see, some of the things that are features, can also be bugs. But they are all elements to be considered in the future we want.
The MemeCoin Future - Snake Oil and Swampland in Florida
The generous reading of the SEC’s enforcement posture to date is that they were trying to avoid this future (the less generous reading is that they have been in the pocket of the financial services industry, preventing open financial infrastructure from emerging). This is the version of crypto that everyone tends to think of - it’s a Ponzi scheme, a scam.
Securities regulations have emerged over time as a way of protecting against scammers. While small, private companies can represent themselves as they please (up to a point - fraud is still fraud), once they attract a certain number of investors, there is a level of disclosure that we require of them to ensure that their claims are largely verifiable, so that the broader investing public can make informed decisions about where they put their money. At least, that’s the idea.
As crypto projects began to emerge, it became clear that instead of offering shares on a public exchange, groups could offer tokens on crypto exchanges to raise funds, with none of the rigour or disclosure required by the stock markets. While there were many serious projects that did this to fund real efforts in creating new use cases, it also sparked a gold rush of memecoins that would hype a release then sell quickly to make a quick exit. In the stock world this was known as a pump-and-dump, and in crypto is referred to as a “rug pull”. There is a very classic shape to these graphs:
The far left of the graph is the pump, and immediately after is the dump, where the project originators liquidate their holdings, take profit, and use retail investors as their exit liquidity. It means that the sellers make a fortune, and anyone who joins in even moments too late loses everything. The above graph, by the way, is $TRUMP coin.
This is what the SEC has been trying to prevent. When I first started researching crypto, the Reddit forums for TerraLuna - which had just imploded in spectacular fashion - had suicide hotlines pinned as the top post. It was that bad.
For the serious members of the crypto community, these are the embarrassing projects that tarnish the industry - hucksters and scammers hustling useless but catchy coins to the desperate, who are hoping to change their lives by catching the next big thing. At this stage, these “projects” make no claim to any kind of utility, but are acting as a kind of digital Beanie Baby. Melania Trump’s coin offers the following in its Terms and Conditions:
THE MELANIA MEMES ARE DIGITAL COLLECTIBLES INTENDED TO FUNCTION AS AN EXPRESSION OF SUPPORT FOR, AND ENGAGEMENT WITH, THE IDEALS AND BELIEFS EMBODIED BY THE SYMBOL “MELANIA” AND THE ASSOCIATED ARTWORK (THE “ARTWORK”) AND ARE NOT INTENDED TO BE, OR TO BE THE SUBJECT OF, AN INVESTMENT OPPORTUNITY, INVESTMENT CONTRACT, OR SECURITY OF ANY TYPE.
This version of the future is one where anyone can make any claim they like, and the onus is entirely on the buyer to ascertain whether a given project has any inherent value or not. The explicit classification here of digital coins as collectibles says it all, but also does nothing but reinforce scepticism about digital currencies.
The Ethereum Future - The World Computer
Ethereum represents an extension of the original logic that Bitcoin brought to life; if value could be stored and transmitted through a distributed, digital platform, then bringing that together with the many ways in which we exchange value in the digital world could allow us to collaborate and exchange in new ways.
Put another way, the first wave of the internet was all about the decentralized sharing of knowledge, but nobody really knew how to share any way other than free. The next wave of the internet was all about extracting value, as advertising and surveillance incentivized centralization and control. This is also the wave that has brought endless subscriptions and user-lock-in as the model for rewarding work. Ethereum, as a distributed computing platform, brings in the possibility of incentive design - the ability to create and share value between people and groups in a peer-to-peer fashion without the intermediaries and tech giants that have crushed the open internet today. Web browsers that share the reward for viewing ads, or micro-tip the authors of content you read. Content networks that distribute benefit to creators. Business cooperatives that are governed by stake, and distribute benefit based on contribution. Music that auto-distributes to creators based on baked-in rights contracts.
The vision is quite radical, and potentially quite disruptive to the many industries that are controlled by highly centralized organizations, like financial services, music, film, gaming, media, publishing and software.
And so…
It’s quite easy to see why there might be a considerable amount of resistance to blockchain and cryptocurrencies, given all that they potentially threaten in incumbent powers. Just in Canada, for music rights distributions, SOCAN collects $523 million (CAD) in royalties, and even after years of improvements, still only distributes $442 million…either by direct deposit, or by sending a cheque; a literal piece of paper in the mail. In 2025. Music rights on the blockchain could always and forever disburse automatically and instantly to all rights holders. The SWIFT network, Visa and other financial intermediaries would be potentially obviated as payments would settle themselves in real time.
Which is all to say that the reason to pay attention to how all of this unfolds is not because, as Krugman says, crypto is only good “for criming”, but because crypto is good for everything that involves an exchange of value. So here are a few policy areas we should all be paying attention to:
* Monetary policy: at scale, something like Bitcoin as a reserve currency affects a key monetary policy lever, as it involves a store of value that can’t be easily manipulated to address issues like inflation in a given economy.
* Privacy: part of the reason crypto currency was appealing to criminals originally was the perception of anonymity. What they have since realized is that the blockchain is a permanent, public record of all transactions, which means future crypto currencies would need to balance the needs for privacy for individuals and the ability to mitigate illicit flows like money laundering and terror financing.
* Securities: there has been no clarity on when crypto is a security and when it is a commodity. Initial coin offerings and similar efforts, to my mind, were clearly securities, but with Ethereum, a given contract on the network might be a security while the token is a commodity. There needs to be good faith, modern design applied to these rules to create regulations fit for a digital economy, not simply using old analogues for new paradigms.
* Transparency: blockchains and cryptocurrencies should be uniquely good at creating transparency because they are public; failures of centralized entities like FTX are inexcusably stupid, because creating transparent proofs should be easy, and financial disclosure for things like ICOs can and should be hard-coded into the blockchain. Good regulation would set standards for these things that could be instantly verified.
* Global Reserve Currencies: Again, at scale, this could represent a major rebalancing of how international finance works, and this comes at a time when global powers want to challenge the supremacy of the US dollar as a global reserve currency. Sanctions work, in part, because of that system, and the shift away from the US dollar to a universal digital currency would have a lasting impact on trade and geopolitics.
* Security: there have been a number of high-profile cases where coding errors and various exploits have been able to siphon money out of various crypto networks. The more value that is stored in these networks, the more attractive they will be as a target (not to mention the threat of Quantum computing to cryptographic systems). If, for example, the US were to create a National Bitcoin Reserve, it would be nice to know that a 12 year old in Latvia couldn’t just walk away with it.
So, while the previous US administration decided to just ignore this whole space and hope it would go away, we are now looking at the Trump administration setting the rules for, potentially, how all future trade and transactions will take place.
I happen to think that’s worth paying attention to, and I’d love it if people like Krugman - a Nobel Prize-winning economist - would take it seriously enough to weigh in on the future.
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If you answered no to all of these things, and you believe that email is as conducive to deep dialogue as a mountain retreat, then you can take the blue pill.
If you believe that, in fact, different conditions can produce different outcomes within individuals and groups, then you take the red pill, and this starts quite an interesting journey in exploring just which conditions might facilitate which outcomes.
This inquiry might be guided purely by intuition. Indeed, I have met many who believe that while differences matter, method isn't possible - this is purely a matter of personal instinct and intuition.
I happen to believe that method is possible; that our decisions about time, place, sequence and focus can, more often than not, create conditions in which certain types of human experience are more likely to emerge.
In short, I believe that decisions, ideas, thoughts, communities, innovations can all be designed...but not directly. More specifically, I believe that the conditions for human outcomes can be designed, even if we do not know specifically what those outcomes will be.
To design this way, we need to think about design a little differently based on a few variables related to design: the object of design, influence on the end product, and agency in the process.
I'll illustrate the difference with three very crude examples, which I think are useful, because I've seen so many cases where they are used almost interchangeably.
Classic Design: in our classic conception of design, the designer perceives a need in the world, and uses their knowledge, experience, skill and intuition to devise something to meet that need. The object of that design process is the artifact itself. The designer, as the visionary and expert, has absolute influence over its creation, and all agency in this process lies with the designer - the end users, in fact, might not even appear in the process at all.
Human-Centred Design: Human-centred design disrupted this model by asking a radical question that now seems pretty basic: "before we make a thing for people, what if we, like, talked to them first?" In this model, the designers engage with the end users to understand their context and needs before they create the artifact. The object of the design process is still the artifact itself, and while users in this model now have some influence - largely as input, final influence still lies with the expert designers. A limited form of user agency enters this model, but only insofar as they are asked.
Increasingly, you see situations where the products we are talking about might be something less tangible. As design filters into the sphere of collaboration or human interaction, the artifacts we start designing for tend to be more conceptual than strictly functional; creativity, new ideas, innovations, partnerships, learning, agreements and strategies. You can't sit on or drive the products of these kinds of design processes, but the outputs are, nonetheless, very much something that groups or organizations want and need. Which brings us to...
Emergent Design: Emergent design focuses on methods to create novel outputs that are not present from any of the individual inputs in a group process; to create conditions in which the desired outcome can't, itself, be directly designed. Learning, innovation, creativity, decisions, agreement, alignment, excitement, understanding are all highly desirable outcomes, but can't be directly manipulated; they are emergent outcomes based on a series of inputs and conditions which either make their emergence more likely or less likely. The object of design, then, is focused on the conditions, as opposed to the outcomes or outputs themselves. The degree to which the outcomes represent the potential of the group depends on the level of influence the "users" have over their creation. The durability of the outcomes depends on how much agency the "users" have before, during and after the process.
This is not intended as a good, better, best model of design, but rather a lens for deciding what approach to design one should use. If you are in the business of producing software, and it is ultimately you who must code, test and ship your product, emergent design is probably not the approach for you.
In any of these situations, if the beliefs and behaviours of participants in a process as individuals or as a collective (or both) is instrumental to the success of the outcomes, that is a good sign you need an emergent design process. If their input is required, but not their actions, then a human-centered design processes might be a good fit. If neither their input, nor their actions are required...you can head to your basement and get to work. This is where agency comes in.
Considering agency can help expose where you are, in fact, designing for emergence. Many of our failed processes result from a focus on centralized agency in situations where the coordinated action of a great number of individuals is required, or where the one holding the pen is not the one responsible for delivering the outcomes. Education often focuses on how to teach, rather than the conditions in which learning occurs. A strategy might focus on an objective opportunity, rather than the appetite of those required to achieve it. We focus on what makes a great leader, and less on how groups work with shared intent.
Many of the groups I have been brought in to help over the years wrestle with very basic questions that, nonetheless, remain very difficult to answer, especially as organizations get larger and the context gets more complex. "Where do we go next as an organization?" "How can all of us work to solve this shared problem?" "How do we adapt our organization to changing circumstances?" "How do we have better ideas?"
This brings me back to my recent training. Nowhere is this more true that in "multi-stakeholder" groups, where individuals from various organizations, all with their own pressures and motives, need to coordinate around a collective issue. Success, at an aggregate level, comes from each individual reaching a personal decision point an impetus to act that matches with enough of the other individuals in the partnership to create a change that all of them contribute to, but none of them control. Emergent Design is the set of principles, models, practices and tools that creates the conditions for that to happen.
We used to say that a group needed a "burning platform" in order to really move to action, but more and more, I don't see that as being anywhere near sufficient. In fact, I think that when it feels like the whole world is on fire, a burning platform doesn't seem as urgent as it used to. Just looking at issues like climate change, we are still not compelled to decisive action despite having a very real, and not-so-metaphorical burning platform.
That's why, these days, I've come to think that intent is everything.
There is a magical moment when people move from a thought or a conversation of some possibility into a visceral desire to act, to bring that possible future into reality. You can feel it in yourself, when you move from indecision into action. You can feel it, as well, when the intent you hold connects with others.
There are so many things in life, whether in our personal lives or our working lives that we do out of routine, obligation or inertia. We go along to get along, we don't rock the boat, we do things the way they've always been done, we do things because we have to, because we're supposed to. Sometimes we change because we're forced to, because our conditions change. Change is happening, but not by design.
Making deliberate change requires intent, and while we may experience intent as spontaneous, as something that "is there or it isn't", I believe there is a process to it. Intent is always individual, even when it's collective. It springs up in the place between a problem and a possibility, when the problem can be seen clearly enough and the possibility is desirable enough to motivate action.
Groups of individuals need to go through the same process to build intent that individuals do, with the added challenge of, well, being a group. For shared intent to emerge, that group needs to come to a collective understanding and definition of the problem they are solving, and a collective vision for how to solve it. Everyone comes to intent on their own, but individual intent that is reached as part of an emerging group intent is incredibly powerful. So, the design challenge is to create a container where a group can arrive at that place together.
A few tips for finding group intent:
* Remember that organizations aren't people: just because an organization has been involved, doesn't mean that the person representing an organization has any context. Focus on people.
* Every new person resets the clock: every time people come and go in the process, you have to assume a reset. If they haven't been on the journey, you need to think how to take them through that journey...but the journey might change with each new person and perspective you add.
* Take time to build language: we all see the world a little differently, and while sharing diverse perspectives can be powerful, moving forward on the assumption that we already share the same perspectives is a recipe for misunderstandings. Diverse viewpoints tend to only be valuable when participants make the differences explicit, and build a new synthesis together.
* Go slow to go fast: taking the time to build shared understanding slowly. Sometimes a first attempt at coming up with a solution will change your definition of the problem; allow these iterations, as it is part of the process of a group making sense together. Solving the wrong problem really well doesn't help.
* Relationships matter: shared intent is not only about a shared understanding of what we want to do, but also a shared understanding of each other. Trusting that others want something as much as we do can help us take the leap into a new reality.
Remembering some of these tips allows you to move from a mechanical approach to movement building to a more organic approach. Scheduling a series of consultations and one-on-one meetings may fill a project plan and look like progress, but understanding that intent is a core design consideration means you need to design for emotion and experience.
If we want a future by design, and not default, we need to design for intent.
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