Senior Fellow Global Design Society
Afghanistan
Speaker A My name is Andrew Olivia. I'm very pleased to have this opportunity to talk to you about a very important project. Poverty is a major global problem. The UN estimates that there are 1.2 billion people living on a dollar a day and a further 2 billion people living on $2 a day. That is really horrifying. The UN, in a 2004 report to the Secretary General, identified entrepreneurship as a prime vehicle for changing this in. Entrepreneurship was felt at all levels of society, could have a really positive effect on wealth generation and on breaking the cycles of poverty. We know that the work of microcredit has made massive changes in developing countries through giving small amounts of money to people to help them set up their own businesses and break that cycle. We know that entrepreneurship offers a way forward. The UN has also estimated that in developing countries, there's a differing percentage, but approximately 80% of business is informal in SubSaharan Africa and 70% in Asia. That means informal businesses is taking place on a one on one person level. But it's open to all sorts of abuses lack of financial support, lack of learning, lack of development, lack of business infrastructures, lack of rule of law in many places. And it makes it very difficult for those small micro enterprises to develop into something that's a little bit bigger and with luck, into something bigger until we've got a medium sized enterprise that's generating wealth. So there's a people pipeline that the UN says isn't working properly. And in developing countries, it's very, very difficult to graduate into a more formal structure. So that people pipeline is something that could be focused upon. How could we actually take successful micro entrepreneurs and move them forward and move them into an organizational structure that allows for more wealth generation, that allows them to be part of the global economy? How can we do that? There is a way. And I think this project might be able to focus scarce resources in a way to do that. We also know that for a project to be successful in combating poverty, it's got to have three factors. It's got to be scalable. We must be able to grow it. It must be replicable so it can be used in another part of the world in the same format. And it needs to have hooks for public and private partnerships so we can bring in partners, we can harness the energy of networks. We know the power of networks from complexity science. It can grow things at exponential rates. So if we can hook those three together, scalable, replicable and partnerships, we can actually have a project that could deliver on that people pipeline, on that business pipeline and grow the companies, grow them at a much faster rate than is currently happening now. And it really is people that can do that. And it's a focused intervention that can do that on those people. I want to talk to you a little bit about the context of this project. For more than 50 years, the work of Elliot Jack has been used globally. He was a profound thinker, and he came up with models that we now understand to be based in complexity science and especially complex adaptive systems theory, which is a biological approach to understanding how companies grow, how companies change, and how human capability works. Jack's work has been used in designing organizations, in providing leadership, but most importantly, it has been used to look at human capability to understand how people cognitively develop over time. His work has allowed us to predict how people's need for work challenges will change and how they will change, and at what time they will change. Jack's work over time has produced a way of looking at information processing. And it's really how do we like to process information to deal with ambiguity and uncertainty? How do we like to make decisions when all the information isn't available to us and this changes? For some people, they like to work in certainty and clarity and in black and white, and other people are happy to make decisions where there's ambiguity and uncertainty, but based on their best judgment. This is the way it's going to turn out. We've used these models, and this is a central point. We've used these models in formal developed countries for more than 50 years. We've used them for structuring organizations, we've used them for mapping talent pools, for understanding who is ready to move to what level of work, when, so we can predict, and it's accurate and it works. And we've got case studies from all around the globe to show that these models actually do deliver outcomes in terms of using the capability models of understanding how people's need for work. Challenges change over time. We could use that to focus on and map out a talent pool and pick up people who've got the potential to operate at levels above where they are currently operating now, where they might be held back due to education, skills, knowledge, experience, whatever other criteria are holding them back. It's an empowering mechanism if we understand what our capability is and where we might actually find satisfaction in five years time, ten years time, 2030, even 40 years time into the future. The validity on these studies is very high, and I can refer you to a lot of reference material if you need to get hold of it to substantiate what I'm talking about. But the key thing is we have got some very important models that could be applied in the fight against poverty, and they haven't. We do know from a little bit of information that we've gleaned out of various studies that the models and the application seem to cut across gender. It seems to be culturally fair, and we can apply it in different ways. I'll give you an example. We did an affirmative action program many years ago in what is apartheid South Africa. And we went down to the Unskilled levels to try and look for people with capability that we could fast track for management development programs. People had equivalent of a grade twelve or a matric, but very often their teachers had a grade six. So the system really didn't produce people who actually understood the schoolwork that they were dealing with. But what we did find is more than 60% of that sample had capability to operate at least two levels of work complexity above where they were. There was another case of a 56 year old painter's assistant who couldn't read or write, but he had significant capability and he had actually called in a whole range of NGOs and support governments to bring education and health into their village. He was a village leader. So he'd used that capability in another way because he didn't have the knowledge and the skills and experience to operate in a business environment. So what we're proposing here with Elliott's models is to do something that has never been done before, to use them in a context and in a way that they have never been applied before until now. I now want to talk to you about the purpose of this project. I've spoken to you about the background. I've spoken to you a little bit about the fact that we have the technology that could be used and it's proven technology, at least in the Western business world. It is. And I now want to talk to you about what I actually propose to do. What I'd like to do is to actually take our resources and apply them in a highly focused manner to identify young, successful micro entrepreneurs who've got the cognitive ability to grow their business into small or medium sized organizations over a period of time with support and with development. So it's to actually go and find young entrepreneurs, micro entrepreneurs, who don't have the education, they don't have the skills, but they've got the desire, and more importantly, they've got the cognitive ability to do it and to support them and help them to grow their businesses in a very focused way. I want to talk to you about the three components that go into this project. Each of them is absolutely essential. The first part of that the first component is we need to be able to identify young micro entrepreneurs who've been successful in their business. We need a talent pool. We need access to a talent pool from which we can select people who've got the cognitive ability that we're looking for, who might be underutilized. They might be able to operate at two or three levels above where they're currently operating. So we need to get in and we need a sample. We need to go and identify those people that we'll be able to develop. So that's the first part of the component. The first critical part is getting access. The second part. The second component of this project is we need partnerships. And I said we needed partnerships previously. We need partnerships with an organization that teaches entrepreneurial skills. We're thinking about a business incubator where we could give basic fundamental, nothing too fancy, basic fundamental knowledge that will assist people in developing and growing their businesses. And we need to give them the support. Let me just talk a little bit about giving them the business skills. We know from the research that the cognitive power that I've been talking about, the cognitive power to grow a business is something that's innate, that develops. We can't really switch it off. That capability to handle ambiguity and uncertainty is there. We know that. We'll call that cognitive power that's there. It unfolds over periods of time. The other elements that we need to tick in this equation would be ensuring that people have the knowledge, the skills and the experience to be able to deliver their capability, to be able to actualize their capability, to be able to move that company along the pipeline from the informal one on one to something that's a bit bigger. They need to have the knowledge and skills to be able to do it. We also have to know from that sample, do they value the work? Do they really want to do this work? And that is critical. And most people do. They want to break the cycle, they want to grow. And we also need to put into this incubator the fact that there's issues around global warming. So we need to do this in a sustainable way. We need to make sure that growing is not at any cost, that growing is a model that we can replicate, that's not going to do any damage. To use those Latin words, premium, non, no carry, first, let's do no harm. And wisdom and relationship management, they are issues that we can teach in an incubator. So we're looking for a partner who can provide that. And we're looking for a partner who's got business links, who's got links where we can come across with ideas about franchises, with ideas about establishing different businesses, where we can put people into a global network of finding ways of growing and actualizing their capability. So it's a really practical way of taking people with that capability and then giving them focused, relevant development. So we need a partner for that. The third part of the component, the third component of this is we need access and we need partnership with a lending institution. We need to be able to give people credit, to be able to grow their businesses. And financial houses don't like lending without collateral, as Mohamed Eunice has made it very clear in a number of his papers. And that's where the whole concept of microcredit came from. So we need to be able to find an institution who's willing to take a risk, who's willing to be able to give out well, it's not completely without any form of credit check because we know we've got the capability. We know people with capability are normally successful in what they do. We've also got the fact that they have been receiving micro credit. So it's not a complete risk situation. So we're looking for someone. We're looking for an organization who's willing to take the risk on that talent pool. So, in conclusion, ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much for having listened to me. I do need your assistance. We have a unique opportunity here to combat poverty by dealing with the pipeline, to move young entrepreneurs into small businesses, into medium businesses, maybe, who knows, into larger organizations. But we need to do this in a partnership. This methodology, if we can be successful in it, it's replicable, it's scalable, and it's got lots of hooks for public and private partnerships. But I do need assistance in those three components. I do need access to an entrepreneurial talent pool of young microcreditors who are successful in their businesses and would like to grow their businesses. If you've got business skills, business incubator for entrepreneurial skills, I'd love to hear from you. And thirdly, if you're a financial services institution who's interested and concerned and wants to lend money to help these business pipelines and these young entrepreneurs, please do contact me. I would like to thank you for listening to me, and my contact details are available, so I look forward to hearing from you. Thank you for your time.