The International VillagE: The Future of Business, Work, and Life

 

This is the International Village Mall.

This shot is taken from the deck where I lived for 13 years. We will be exploring the story behind these two over the coming summer and fall. 
This International Village is going to be ground zero for the Ecosystem Alliance's first major project. Transforming Malls into the future of business, work and life in cities the world over.

This is Me

Ecosystem Orchestrator Extraordinaire!!

I cannot design an ecosystem, much less develop one.

True Confession 

It Takes An International VillagE to Raise An Ecosystem

Hello, my name is Gregory D Esau and I am an Ecosystem Orchestrator, Designer and Developer. 

The irony, or paradox if you will, of my line of work is I actually can't do any of this. 

It's impossible. 

Individuals can't orchestrate ecosystems, nor can they design them, and they certainly can't develop them. 

The only way to Design, Develop and Orchestrate ecosystems the right way is through an international village, a village of around 1,500 people. Very select people. How select? We're going to get to that. 

What does an Ecosystem Designer, Developer and Orchestrator actually...um...do?? What are our chops?

I'm glad you asked. Ecosystem Design Principles. 

And for that an Ecosystem DDOer has to be a specialised- generalist with a lot of range and a lot of depth. 

For a high performance economic ecosystem, this range covers around thirty different "knowledge domains" and the knowledge networks that allows the orchestrator and their teams to best understand where the peak of those domains need to operate at in field conditions every single day. 

For economic ecosystems that function at scale, the Ecosystem Orchestrator needs to be able to attract a "Smart Swarm" of around 150 people who work closely together to collectively orchestrate the ecosystem. 

Note the word "attract". It is an important distinction, as you cannot "hire" a Smart Swarm. 

A Smart Swarm is by our definition a collective of autonomous individuals whose collective output exceeds their individual output by magnitudes of 10X or more. 

That is, if individually they could produce at a rate that puts their market value at say, $1,000,000 per year, that's $150 million gross output for 150 individuals. 

However, if they worked collectively effectively, the gross output of this 150 person Swarm would be $1.5 billion. That's network productivity. 

What we Masters of Ecosystem Orchestration need to be good at are:

1. Who should be in the Village, their Swarm, and all other the Domain Swarms.
2. How to create the conditions to make these groups 10X or more in terms of network productivity. 
3. Defining the Strategy of the Ecosystem, its Village and its Swarms
4. Getting buy-in daily from everyone involved at an inter-connective, interdependent level.
5. Getting the economic incentives right across a spectrum of essential "capitals'. 
6. The governance and distribution models right.
7. Creating the culture for highly collaborative and diverse markets of open and closed networks. 
8. Creating the environments that maximise the very best of human nature while mitigating the very worst of human nature. 
9. Staggering degrees of complexity. We eat chaos for breakfast, lunch and dinner. We are the masters of probabilities. 
10. Military grade network security. This is stupifyingly difficult. Because. You know. People. 
11. Trust is our Code.
12. We put the Ordinary in Extraordinary. We are only as good as our ecosystems. 
13. Platform Development and Management. Platform design is how ecosystems capture value. 
    
     

Easy-peasy, right!?!?

This, my friends, are what we're going to find out over the next six to sixty months. 

How hard or easy it will be is entirely interdependent on our ability to stop knowing and to start learning. For the level we will be performing at, knowing is a disadvantage. 

Continuous learning and execution is the only advantage. 

The exceptional people we will attract already embody this mindset.

Can we bring together this right mix of people that can design and develop The International Village Business Model for the Future of Work and Value Creation at the Civic level to life? 
Can we find the right mix of people who can touch, feel, see, hear and sense the staggering potential and the depth of the threats society faces today?

If things flame out in six months...it's back to the drawing boards for me. 

However, if we can keep breaking through barriers on our way from one stage to the next over the sixty months, then we have a better than average chance to capture the estimated "sixty trillion in annual revenue that ecosystems will redistribute by 2025".

How do we design, develop and orchestrate ecosystems that will capture the majority of that sixty trillion in revenue redistribution? 
I mean, this isn't a bad carrot, no? Imagine the vitality of cities if collectively we could capture those value flows? 

These questions only an International Village can determine. 

Over the next six months a growing tribe of us will convince you that this International Village, this village that will personify the future of work and business, will be the best investment there is in the world today.

What I believe is everyone this mastery of ecosystem orchestration needs are one degree of separation away from finding each other and coming together as an International Village. 

"Welcome back my friends to the show that never ends": The International VillagE. 

Over the next six months my intention as an Orchestrator is to bring together the extensive network around domains of knowledge necessary for high performance economic ecosystems that I have attracted over the last 25 years along with the network of the types people who exist in Vancouver and cities the world over, all into this International Village for Ecosystem Design, Development and Orchestration under one roof. 

At the Vancouver International Village we are going to bring together daily the very best of what Vancouver has to offer in 21st century business skills and mix us with the world's leading practitioners for top tier performance in open-to-closed network performance. 

The Vancouver International Village will become the model that cities the world over can emulate for developing their own high performance ecosystems. 

We are going to create breakthrough performance at the systematic level, a breakthrough that will dwarf what the assembly line did for manufacturing productivity. 
Manufacturing productivity is linear.

Network productivity is non-linear, exponential and emergent.  

Linked together as the International Civic Ecosystem Alliance, cities will have the ability to shape their economic future by capturing the full potential of the digitally enabled society. 

The Era of Ecosystems as the Engines of the Economy will usher in an economic revolution that will both boost productivity by magnitudes of ten or more, an economy based on ecosystems will by vastly more adaptive to climate change and the innovation necessary to respond. 

An economic alliance of the natural ecosystems of cities allow the global economy to become what Nassim Nicholas Taleb describes as Antifragile. 

Who Belongs in the Vancouver International VillagE? 

The short answer is anyone who loves this city that wants to be part of designing our economic prosperity and sustainability.  

The deeper answer is those that can flourish in this new world village of continuous new value creation. The 1,500 of us that wind up calling this Village our place of work will be the most remarkable people this city has to offer. 

This will be the most challenging, most rewarding experience of our lives. We will evolve towards becoming clusters of global alliance of villages nested in cities the world over that will shape and define our economic future. 

Our daily actions will collectively determine our ability to house, clothe, feed, entertain and elevate the lifestyles of billions of people while at the same time making those lifestyles sustainable within our planet's vast web of ecological ecosystems. 

The Vancouver International VillagE model for Ecosystem Design, Development and Orchestration will draw a balanced and diverse mix of the best and brightest from five structurally important networks vital to every city's functionality:  

1. The Service Network. If we have learned anything from the pandemic, we learned that "essential services" isn't just hyperbole. 
2. The Business Network. Business networks have been the lifeblood of the civic economy ever since there has been cities. Combined with the Global Performance Networks we will establish these networks as the most influential in the global economy.
3. The Creative Networks. Easily the least understood of an city's economic vitality while also the network that will give the International Village its innovative power and distribution capacity. 
4. The Builders Network. Put simply, these are the people that build and maintain our city's capacity to house its people, their places of work, the ways that we travel and generally how we make everything we rely on for our physical economic structures. 
5. The Public Sector Network. This is the network that binds it all together. 
   
   
   

All five natural networks interweave together with our Global Performance Networks to create the greatest economic engine in civic history. 

Thousands of these Ecosystem Orchestrator Villages nested in cities the world over that will transform how we can see our future and design our way to global prosperity and sustainability. 

Keystone Players

What is distinct about high performance networks are the types of roles that have to be filled in comparison to a business or government organisation. 

Networks thrive on attracting talent, not hiring talent. 

The people that thrive at the highest levels in these types of organisations have very unique skills and personalities that cannot be captured by the typical corporate role as designated by titles. Therefore, you will find none of that here in the Village. 

We will be looking for people that have proven abilities to orchestrate networks in their day to day activities for high value creation. 

We need orchestrators throughout the five structurally essential networks as list above, likewise we need orchestrators that can cover every aspect of civic cultural groups from the richest to the poorest, the right to the left, the religious to the scientist, to the indivualist to the collectivist and together we must find a collective intelligence around our economic and ecological future. 

Orchestrators are the most powerful role in an ecosystem. Conversely, Orchestrators are the most immune to the intoxicating effects of this power. 

More specifically, are the different types of ecosystems that require the highest mastery of the craft of  orchestration, and these are:

1. The City Orchestrator. 
   The City Orchestrator is extraordinary in every way.
   A successful City Orchestrator conducts the essential 1,500 regulars of the City's International Village and is responsible for its ability to deliver on our mission. Orchestrators require an exceptional ability to zoom out to the big picture and zoom in to the most detailed aspects of civic life. They must have exceptionally high levels of comprehension of a staggering array of domains of expertise of which they are responsible for keeping at peak operational effectiveness.
   They must have exceptional EQ around a staggering array of cultures that the modern metropolis contains.
   The City Orchestrator must ensure the performance conditions where all people's lives are enhanced by the City's economic ecosystems. It is a rare and exceptional person that can fullfil this role.
   For those with the abilities to take on this role, it will be the role of a lifetime, defining your city's future for generations to come. 
2. Domain Expertise Orchestrators.
   To compete in the era of economic ecosystems, the ability to orchestrate a strategically select portfolio of domains of expertise is the number one competitive advantage.  For Designing, Developing and Orchestrating entire city ecosystems, these domains cover next generation technologies like blockchain and cryptocurrencies, aligned artificial intelligence, the internet of things (Swarm Intelligence), 5G mobile networks,, VR/AR/AE, autonomous technology orchestration, 3D manufacturing and materials science, all of which are severely restricted by the current economic incentives and corporate structures. 
   Other essential Domain Orchestrators cover everything from the UX to project management to product development to new business model development to teamwork to personal development within high performance networks. 
   Sciences that cover everything from evolution to evolutionary economics, from neuroscience to biology, from ecological systems to cultural systems. From the science of networks to astrophysics and a whole lot more all require exceptional orchestrators. 
   In all, a high performance economic ecosystem will find there will be around thirty essential domains to maintain this systematic performance, along with baskets of essential skills to practice, hone and harness. 
   These essential proprietary domains in turn rely of many sub-domains of science to keep each at the tops of their professions. 
3. Essential Civic Network Orchestrators
   These are the Five Structurally Essential Networks that function within the Business, Creative, Builder, Services and Public Sectors of every city worldwide. 
   Each requires an exceptional person at bringing the massive potential within these natural civic networks together in a daily symphony to unleash an economic and cultural renaissance in their home cities. 
4. Cultural Orchestrators
   Every city is a composite of hundreds or thousands of different cultural groups which are upon themselves micro ecosystems. 
   Cultural Orchestrators work as boundary spanners within the Vancouver International Village. Cultural Orchestrators are the "Social Glue" that make these highly complex social-business work villages function at exceptional levels. 
   
5. Network Skills Orchestrators
   This is the level where rubber meets the road every single second of every single day in the life of a city. The ability of the International Village to create and orchestrate economic performance from the city's vast web of ecosystems is only as good as the skills of the people in the network. 
   It is noteworthy here to mention that the cryptocurrency for the Civic Economic Ecosystem Alliance will be the key for incentivizing and rewarding network skills. 
6. The Ecosystem Business Broadcast Network
   Strategy in the age of competing ecosystems  requires a broad media portfolio with specific focus on economies as ecosystems and highlighting the very unique properties of economic ecosystems and the distinct advantages these properties present to cities that are hard to capture any other way. 
   The EBBN is also how Orchestrators 'conduct' their networks on a daily basis. Likewise, the EBBN is how the networks learns, a perpetual learning environment for how we stay ahead of the curve and define our city's cultural and economic future. 
   It is hard to overstate the importance of the EBBN to the performance and vitality of ecosystems. This is how the system communicates to itself, how signals are sent and received and the core of our data strategy. 
7. Capital Orchestration
   Ecosystem economies measure capital at a much deeper level than a financial transaction token (fiat type national currency). Indeed, it is this extremely narrow concept of capital that severely restricts the breakout potential of "Capitalism" in the age of digital networks. 
   In High Performance Economic Ecosystems essential capital includes Social, Intellectual, Reputation and Engagement in holistic balance with Financial Capital. 
   An Ecosystem's digital currency must capture that balance in its accounting principles. Together these essential capitals must represent that high standards of Trust that network performance is incumbent upon. 
   Capital Orchestration is the next generation of venture capital and Capital Orchestrators are the next generation of venture capitalists. 
   This means systematic performance generated through the interdependencies of Operational Business Models that CO capitalizes. These CBMs in turn become investment vehicles within the ecosystem at either the Civic or Global Ecosystem Alliance levels. 
   
8. The Digital Citizen Pioneers
   A generation that is now thirty years old, we are a spectrum of citizens that are highly digitally astute at the global level and deeply embedded at the local level. We are natural boundary spanners and can move comfortably among many many different conversations and cultures. 
   We are the ones that hold in our hearts, minds and souls the massive potential networks have for unleashing the very best in humanity while keeping our most destructive traits in check. 
   We are the people that will make or break our future. 
   We are the approximately 1.5 billion people that will enable this historical transformation from an industrial society to that of a networked society.  

What's Next?

If you call the Greater Vancouver area your home, and you think you would excel in such a powerful network environment, connect with me on LinkedIn and we can begin get you familiar with the minds behind this venture. 

If this turns out to be something you just have to be a part of, you can join the regular Saturday morning virtual venture meets. 
These high energy meets are where we'll discover where you can develop your own role in the Village and how you can contribute to our earliest project developments which will centre on retail rejuvenation, digital property development, "Smart" infrastructure,  digital currencies and tokens, and the Ecosystem Business Broadcast Network as our marketing strategy. 
Together this basket of projects will be how we learn to Design, Develop and Orchestrate their ecosystems and along the way how we create the Social Business Village model as the future of work and continuous unique value creations. 

If you have what it takes to thrive here, you will have found the way to get the very most out of life and business while creating a prosperous and sustainable future for billions of citizens worldwide. 
The International Village will be the best investment you will ever make. 

Hope to see you soon!
Gregory D Esau

The Civic Ecosystem Alliance: Ecosystenomics

 

Why the Economics of Ecosystems Are the Only Way to Unlock the Full Potential of the Digital Society

Two weeks ago I debuted my ideas for the Vancouver Ecosystem Alliance Pilot Project. The response was well beyond anything I could have imagined. This wasn't just the response to the blog and share on LinkedIn that blew me away, it was the amazing people that showed support for a project I'd been very nervous about debuting. 

This in turn had a cascade effect on the types of resources that would now come to my attention that a performance ecosystem are requires to compete for in order to gain relevance in the market.
This in turn provided me with fresh ways to accelerate the growth of the Civic Ecosystem Alliance by seeding other city's pilot projects in parallel. 
The market for an ecosystematic approach to our civic economies was much stronger than I had anticipated!
Now the questions become, are cities and their citizens ready for my brand of ecosystem economics?

Scaling a high performance ecosystem for transforming civic economies is vastly different than small scale ecosystems that often naturally form around a product or a company or an industry.
Or platform ecosystems for that matter, like an Amazon or a Facebook. 
Performance at this scale involves thousands of businesses from multi-nationals to sole-proprietorship and everything in-between working interdependently to produce high value for clients within well designed platform based user-interface at "ground" level of a city. 

Ecosystenomics is the understanding of the value capture of these interdependencies at multi-granular levels. 
In order to capture and share the value of these interdependencies, the platform's network must have extraordinarily high levels of trust. The greater the network's trust, the greater the conditions for emergence properties that will enable systematic breakthroughs for economic performance. 

This level of trust requires a much different types of relationships between consumers and the markets they frequent. For the ecosystem designer, attaining the optimal conditions for trust in networks for enabling quality economic performance is the main guiding principle. 

To achieve these conditions, cities and the businesses that serve them along with their citizens and customers,  will be looking for the right incentives to bring the right combinations of people together that can form the network structure that create high trust, high performing economic networks. 

The Civic Ecosystem Alliance is my vision based on decades of research on how to create the right incentives and vehicles for developing high trust, high performance strategic networks for economic impact at the civic ecosystem level. 

The World Needs You

Yes, you.
Odds are, you are far too modest to realise we are talking to you.
You are one of the millions of unsung heroes that make the world's real economy function every day. 

We're not talking about the financial economy that is covered by the financial press. 
We are talking about the real economy that happens every single day in cities, towns and communities every single minute of every single day. That economy. 

You are the "you" we are trying to reach.
You run businesses big or small, you work in health care, you build things from bridges to custom homes, you create experiences from music to movies, from gameware to business models, you maintain our buildings, our streets, our infrastructure. You work to protect us from cyber-criminals to thieves at all levels. We work in government, we volunteer for churches, soccer, fund raisers, public policy. 

We are the 10% that make or break performance in civic economies the world over, the 10% the eyes of the economic lens cannot see. 

Yet you are the difference. Every day. 

The Purpose of the Civic Ecosystem Alliance: How To Design and Develop a High Performance Ecosystem

Our purpose, our mission is simple. To design and develop the platform for hosting the ecosystenomic conditions where the world's best performers across the entire civic economic spectrum will excel in ways they cannot in the current industrial era business ecosystems they are constrained by. 

This is both much harder...and much simpler than it sounds! 

Simpler, in that we have an incredible body of work and practitioners for designing and developing such a platform, and for creating systematic performance.
This isn't about working harder, it is working smarter. 
We already have everything we need to create such a platform where we can accelerate our productive growth free of the shackles of the industrial institutions. 
In other words, we have the networks and the knowledge to design higher performing networks. 

This part is easy. 

What's the hard part? Convincing ourselves to invest in ourselves. 

That's our collective and individual hurdles we must overcome.
My job as the Lead Ecosystem Orchestrator is to convince enough of you to take The Leap. 

The leap to invest in ourselves so we can create the environments where we best excel. To create the environments where we own the means of our own production. 
High performance ecosystems are in essence "mesh capitalism", performance networks that own themselves through tokens and cryptocurrencies. 

Enter the Ecosystem Business Broadcast Network

What is Media? 

Media is a broadcast means to introduce two halves of the market to one another.
Buyers to sellers, sellers to buyers.
This two way dynamic covers everything from ideas to toasters. From services to experiences to policies to lifestyles to education to jobs to be done. 
Media is how we connect this multi-dimensional market and how we understand the world through its lens. 

In the digital economy, the medium is the message, the territory is the map. 

The Ecosystem Business Broadcast Network will be how we communicate with our ecosystem markets to continuously learn how to design, develop and build new businesses and models for our offerings back into the market. 

The Ecosystem Business Broadcast Network is how we communicate our culture and how our culture works to create continuous value in open and closed networks. 
To be successful our broadcast network needs to be effective at capturing the attention of our best economic performers that fit our ecosystenomic philosophy, and in turning our captive actions into high market value. 
To be successful as a broadcast network for the Civic Ecosystem Alliance, we have to bring our economic vision to billions around the world as means to raise their standards of living. 

Stars Are Born

As we are barely a gleam in anyone's eyes just yet, I am looking for high performers who will be the "stars" of the Ecosystem Business Broadcast Network. 

You bridge that world between the very top of your profession and the ability to communicate to your network a vision for moving a product or service along an "assembly line" (your business model) of some sort that brings above average returns. 
You already understand the power of networks and your ability to orchestrate them. 

As a "Star" within the Civic Ecosystem Alliance using the Ecosystem Business Broadcast Network, "we" will be reaching a potential market of 2-3 billion other market participants in the economies of cities. 

By growing an Ecosystenomic network we can shape the narrative for what a healthy, sustainable economy can work like for 9-10 billion people by 2050. 
By growing an Ecosystenomic network of hundreds of millions of high performing people and teams, we will be designing the future of work which in turn designs the future of business and the future of our relationship between business and society. 

An Ecosystenomic economy rewards the efforts of all the people who make cities the greatest form of human organisation and experience. People are what make cities great, and cities are what make people great. 

Healthy prosperous cities and citizens are the key to a sustainable economy. Understanding these economies as the ecosystems that they are is how we will achieve systematic breakthroughs in network performance and raising the standards of living for billions of citizens the world over. 

Become the Star Performer the world needs right now by joining the teams at the Ecosystem Business Broadcast Network!  

The Vancouver Ecosystem Alliance: The Pilot Project

 Cities, Their Ecosystems and the Future of the Global Economy

We could also title this; How urban communities will design and develop the future of the global economy, as this is what we are are doing with the Vancouver Ecosystem Alliance Pilot Project. 

Hello, Vancouver!

My name is Greg Esau, and I have dedicated my life to learning how cities will use the power of ecosystems to shape the global economy. 

The Vancouver Ecosystem Alliance is a pilot project whose purpose it to develop of core base of advocates, catalysts, influencers, change makers, leaders and orchestrators within the Greater Vancouver area and to develop our capabilities around a shared understanding of why civic based, platform hosted strategic ecosystems are the key to shared prosperity and a sustainable global economy. 

With this blog and the date of May 2, 2021 we are marking the beginning of a new era of economics: Ecosystemonics. 

Is this a bold vision? Absolutely it is! 
Is it crazy? Many will think so. All bold visions start out as concepts that the majority will think as crazy. This is the essence of innovation over thousands of years. 

However, we are not talking to those people. Yet. 
We're talking right now to the millions of people worldwide who understand the full potential of the digital economy.
We're talking to the 1.5 billion people who make this world function every single minute of every single day whose productive output is crippled and hijacked by ineffective, outdated corporate structures, industrial era management and leadership systems, toxic work environments and incentive systems. 
We're talking to the hundreds of thousands of people whose domain expertise and culture collectively can transform how we work and produce value from that of the "old economy" to that of the new economics of platforms, ecosystems and digital property. 

United in an alliance of civic nested ecosystems, we can....and we will guide the world through the greatest transformation in human history. 

Ecosystems: The Next Generation of Markets

Cities and markets have been the basis of the economy for over five thousand years. Capital and technology evolved together to accelerate the growth of both in the industrial era. 
Communication and information technologies allowed the organisation and scale needed to move goods and services to the people who required them. 
These basic components were the building blocks of the global economy, along with the types of business and political ideologies that would come to dominate in this environment. 

When information and communication technologies began to evolve and take root in the 1950's, the seeds were sown for an economy based on a very different set of organising principles. 
With the internet's WWW emerging in the early 1990's, the platform now allowed an organisation to scale in ways unimaginable a few years earlier. 

Twenty-five years on, digital platforms now dominate and are disrupting every aspect of modern economic life. And it is data and its value capture that allows these mega-entities to dominate. 

This is both a threat and a tremendous opportunity for cities and citizens. 
These opportunities can only be unlocked via ecosystems and their unique problem solving properties. 
And crypro-currencies will allow us to capture and share this co-created value in ways the corporate organisation never could. 

This is why we are here. 
This is what the Vancouver Ecosystem Alliance Pilot Project will allow us to learn and grow:
A global economy by citizens, for citizens. 

The new economic reality is we not need corporations for the means of production and distribution of goods and services. 
The new economic reality is that these two hundred year old institutions and the power that grew around them are the main barriers to the full potential of the digital economy. 
An alliance of civic nested, platform hosted ecosystems will take their place. 

We Are The Economy

This is a theme I will repeat often. Ecosystems can reflect this reality. 

But we have to want it. We have to work for it. 

The Vancouver Ecosystem Alliance Pilot Project is our gateway to this new economic future. 

Stay tuned. We already have the capabilities. 
We just have to organise. 

All the best, 
Greg