Transforming Systems: Lessons from Taiwan's Movements by Noah Yeh | Devcon SEA

[Music] can you guys hear me okay hi guys my name is Noah so today I'm going to talk about the strategies of making changes and our Reflections from Taiwan so 10 years ago this community called go zero started in Taiwan it started from having a bunch of hackers trying to open up government data and later in the years it become a become of uh digital democracy in in globally in the world a leader of digital democracy in the world and in recent years the momentum has slowed down a little bit so two years ago me and my uh partner Vivian here uh basically started this initiative called dowzer and the mission was to supercharge gozero to supercharge the digital democracy movement and we did a bunch of things this include uh the decentralized ID uh uh pilots in Taiwan this include various retroactive uh funding experiments this include a a lot of research fund in the commer type Dow taipe plurality type a bunch of different things but at certain point I started asking myself what has really changed did we really were we really able to help at certain Point uh despite the uh success of all the relative success of all the experiments um this year in April gov zero basically posted this picture saying that okay so um we're running out of funding please donate to gozero so it can uh keep running its B monthly hackathons continuously which the by monthly hackathons for 10 years it has never uh passed once so this is uh a signal that maybe uh despite all the experiments that we've done uh maybe we need to go deeper on how we can make systemic change in the future so if we are to initiate something new if we really want to change system to the better positively sustainably what are the strategies we are to adopt what are the potential tools we can use and what are the r roles we need to play inside these systems so I think of course there are a lot of research being done and one of them is probably a lot of people here is not so unfamiliar with is the complex systems I won't go into details of what complex systems are but I will talk about the concept of emergence so emergence is the systems behaviors for example the birds you can see right here the flock of birds the movement how it moves this is uh the phenomena this is the emergence of a system working together and the crypto Market going up and down the stock market going up and down how the traffic moves these are all uh uh example of uh emergence and what caused this emergence uh the answer does not lie in the individual unit the composition of the individual unit but for take the birds for example it's just a couple of simple rules that make the birds move this way and it's actually really simple the bird basic thing about we I won't say too close or too far from each other and I will align my direction of flight uh according to the the birds around me so that's how these uh emergence become so if change is emergence and emergence is caused by a set of simple rules then maybe sustainable change Maybe change uh if we want to make change then we need to uh build the adoptions of uh new rules new interaction rules that's naturally developed not someone tell us what to do but naturally developed between the individuals inside the systems so these are some if you uh go to if you scan the QR code you can see a for article talking about all these potential leverage points that we now know that the point of changing the systemss is basically to change the rules of interactions and what kind of tools can we use so the lower uh the less powerful and lower order uh tools are uh changing the inputs and outputs of the systems or changing the speed of inflows and outflows of the system people what people will be familiar here is the mechanism design you can design the punishment you can design the rewards of the system to encourage people to do do certain things you can also change the goals of the systems these are some leverage points that people can use to basically try to change uh how a system behaves however if you think about it that we don't always listen to our teachers right or we don't always listen to our CEOs our boss we don't always listen to the leaders in the D and we B they can uh uh have rules set up for the organization but we don't always behave that way uh the interactions between me and my peers individual with another individual is not always follow the the rules of the system and the more powerful leverage points that people can use is actually changing the mindset changing how people believes what people believes changing the Paradigm of a system that's the more powerful uh uh leverage point that people can use but coming back to now I know the the key is to change the rules and The Leverage points are the tools where do I put myself inside a system that has the biggest potential to make actual changes there are four that I listed the first one is topown right top down I don't need to talk about the top the the problems with the top down approach there's corruption there's all that but the real limitations the the strength of the topown approach is that it has access to a lot of different to tools that we talked about it can change the taxes it can change the the bottom line it can have the punishment it can has have the reward mechanisms to to do mechanism designed to change the system uh but take uh Global SG goals for example it's a very top- down approach right but only 16% of the global SG goals are on track right now there are limitations to what the toptown approach uh despite all the problems can actually change in today's world and so this is uh uh the top down approach the second one is bottom up we talk about decentralized organizations we talk about all these uh movements occupi Wall Street and all that and of course the bottom of approach you don't have as many leverage points and the tools that you can use uh to change the systems but it might have the most powerful ones which is the changing the Paradigm changing the mindset changing the beliefs of the whole uh system so and the the way to measure success for this uh uh bottom up think about what the Mandela's uh idea that Aya mentioned in the starting keynote that's one example of influencing inspiring the system and the measure is basically not to uh measure the actual system output but to measure the initiatives that these bottomup approaches actually inspired so this this is how we measure uh uh the success of these bottom up approaches the third one is the outsid approach so basically you have the uh uh pop-up cities you have the network states you have the experimental schools and uh uh problem with these uh pop uh these outsid approaches is very clear that is doesn't have direct control over the tools Over The Leverage points that we just talked about you have to indirect influenc the top down or the bottom of approach to basically make changes but it's not unprecedented experimental schools in the 1990s basically was the inspiration for No Child Left Behind policies in the United States so that was one of the case that was successful but the one I really most want to talk about that's the most effective is possibly the Catalyst approach so Christina figures was the head of uh U uh unfccc um in 2015 she pulled together 195 Nations to agree upon the Paris agreement which uh probably most people have heard about uh uh here and the key turning point how she would talk about it is is that she has this stubborn optimism that pushes things forward but I think the key turning point is that she pushes enough it's clear today now but it wasn't back then is the pushes forward the clean energy industry to the point that the cost is low uh is lowered and the capacity was increased to the point that it made economic sense for the Nations and for the corporations and not just to meet their existing goals but to exist uh exceed their their their current goals so the key here is how might we develop nurture build solutions that are there are value aligned but at the same time it helps system existing system players to exceed their goals that should really uh uh catalyze the changes that we might want to see so but with all the changes we know the strategies we know the tools and we know where what kind of roles we play how do we know that we are really making positive emergence the answer is we probably don't uh Zuckerberg didn't imagine imag that he will cause a whole generation of anxiety when he started Facebook right but if you look at Peter sanji's 11 laws of systems thinking the highlighted ones today's problems come from yesterday's Solutions the far the harder you push the harder the system pushes back faster is not always slower so my personal guideline from making changes now the first one is to be Catalyst uh because that's the most probably the most effective way of making changes hold on to Stubborn optimism to learn from Christina figures to learn from the Paris agreement example uh build value aligned solutions that help system players exceed existing goals so not just build ethical Solutions but also make sure these ex uh ethical Solutions and the same time may be able to uh for example uh get more be more profitable than the existing Solutions so the system players go towards that direction slowly currently because we don't know what kind of negative externality we're going to create and no blame this is system ignorance is not one person's fault so we are alling this together we all have a responsibility so hopefully the will this is helpful for the change makers out there and that will be my talk thank you thank you so so much Noah for sharing your insights so we'll begin the Q&A portion um if you haven't already yet please scan the QR code or open the devcom passport app to submit your questions so we'll start with the first one thanks for the great insights not to split hairs but isn't Catalyst just a different form out outside in yeah I I think it depends how you look at it so um basically the the difference is the outsid in approach is uh like the popup Villages uh or the um experimental schools they build a perfect world outside of the existing systems but the catalyst is actually working with existing system players to make sure they achieve their goals so one uh uh the outsid approach is mostly like a demonstration right but it's not directly influencing The Leverage Point inside the existing systems yet the catalyst is directly trying to uh infu fluence the the The Leverage points inside the system I think that is the uh difference all right and while we are oh another question if you can go back to two years ago what would you change wow this is this is something I'm just starting to think about so I'm not entirely sure but like I said I will probably try to adopt the Catalyst approach and see how I can work with exist existing system players try to understand their goal goals and take time to develop the kind of Technology the kind of Solution that's driving uh this forward one one example I think might be interesting recently there's a book called the uh infectious generosity uh written by Chris Anderson from T talk from wired and so that is that book is talking about how generosity combined with creativity can actually be a business strategy that because generosity can go very viral on the internet so if we Infuse that value aligned Solutions with the uh existing uh goals of the system players who is wanting to get more exposure that might cause some changes so that might be a Direction that's that uh I'm thinking about as well all right and I see we have some upvoted questions so say someone wants to start a movement to achieve more visibility in a country with a lack of culture of digital democracy how how do you get started I I think it is very different in every single country or it is very different in every single context but so I cannot say for sure but of course what I did not talk about is uh uh the the way of changing system is that I assume that the original systems is already intact and can be changed but there are of course certain um uh certain scenarios where the existing system should be overthrown or uh should become a competitor of the existing system that's a completely different scenario that we're talking about so it really depends on the context but happy to answer if you can uh give me more context when I go down the stage happy to talk thank you so much Noah we are at time for his session but if you are really interested in getting to chat with him more please feel free to look for him