Can the digital economy ever be sustainable?

Hurricane Harvey dropped 52 inches of rain and 27 trillion gallons of water on Texas and Louisiana. And a new kind of “All-hands-on-deck” response emerged.

Glenn Reynolds, author of An Army of Davids, writes: “But the real difference isn’t citizens getting involved, it’s the willingness of responsible officials to see that involvement as a plus rather than a potential problem … the excellent record of civilian volunteer responders in the post-9/11 record is behind that willingness.”

The Cajun Navy flotilla of private boat owners demonstrated the value of government, the private sector and regular people working together. The value of such cooperation in earlier disasters like Katrina and Sandy increased the ability to coordinate when Harvey struck.

Traditional global governance is failing. Yet the need for effective collaboration, delivering good performance in the face of new challenges has never been greater. Good governance requires openness, transparency and integrity which are in short supply at a time of rapid economic disruption and social and political change.

As we face the challenge of transforming to a digital economy and society we face a difficult set of risks where the trade-offs for decisions will affect different organizations’ ability to act, as well as education, health and economic opportunity. Yet with the flood of information, many people will have the opportunity to voice their concerns, and face the frustration that their opinions will not be considered, their energy and skills ignored.

Positive deviance is an approach that harnesses the solutions of people already in the community and spreads the solutions. Outside of the US and Western Europe, local community innovations are changing the future of the digital economy and society.

In Singapore, United Overseas Bank launched BizSmart, an integrated group of five cloud-based digital apps so that SMEs could reduce costs by up to 60%. Business owners can get direct account transaction data flows using one of these apps, Xero

Bulgaria greatly expanded internet usage in 1999 by making it easy for businesses to start being internet service providers. Speeds went up to 1G per second and prices went down to 10 Euros per month.

Meanwhile, Vodafone worked with mobile operators in Africa in 2007. In Kenya Safaricom expanded their loyalty card programme and made it possible for people to use it to transfer money and to access microfinance. This has since spread to Afghanistan, South Africa, India, Romania and Albania.

By June 2016 Tanzania had 7 million MPesa accounts operated by Vodacom. In India, 1.1 billion people had digital identities for the first time which enabled payments to flow to the intended recipients, and in full.

This approach of Positive Deviance is neither new nor unusual. What is surprising is that Big Tech has not embraced it as they feverishly work to drive the digital transformation, generating a backlash as jobs are lost and as debates on the ethics of artificial intelligence are heating up.

The original digital transformation of business used very similar approaches, working closely with the innovators and early adopters then working to spread the solutions. Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers by Geoffrey Moore was first published in 1991, revised in 1999 and was updated again in 2014. Moore built on the technology adoption lifecycle (Wikipedia entry), a sociological model that describes the adoption or acceptance of a new product or innovation.

Working with the assets and strengths of a community is the modern-day equivalent of working with the businesses and organizations who had the strategic vision and strong IT departments able to take advantage of advances like relational databases, client server technologies and enterprise software.

A sustainable global digital economy and society can be built and developed by the people who live in communities. Positive Deviance is an approach which allows the trade-offs to be decided at the local level, in a sustainable manner. The openness, security, transparency and integrity and inclusiveness of the networks that connect these communities is essential to create a trusted framework for investments to pay off for the borrowers and the lenders.