Making governments futureready together

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imagine a world in 2030 where access

to a better quality of life is available

for everyone

a real sense of community is within

reach

you can propose new ideas for example

building a new park

have people vote for your idea give

feedback

and ultimately see your idea being

implemented

the relationship with government

representatives has transformed

citizens are heard and rewarded for the

engagement

governments have achieved the goal of

making and keeping

their citizens happy

this is what the future ready government

looks like

sadly the situation the reality today is

that

many national governments are broken

simply look at what has happened in the

past years

brexit the trump administration

venezuela’s dictatorship

resulting in violation of human rights

and hyperinflation

the ongoing crisis in belarus and the

list goes on and on

i would like to look closer at one

country lebanon

where there is no clear government at

the moment

after three crisis first a national

government crisis second coved

third and finally the port explosion

i feel a very strong and personal call

to help lebanon

you see i’m french i’m

based in luxembourg i have lebanese and

german blood

as a kid i spent every single summer in

lebanon

i love this country my father is

lebanese and i have lots of family

still there from what my cousins and my

close relatives told me

people in lebanon have lost hope

2010 i’ve been working closely with

national governments and the

institutions and i see a huge potential

for transformation i’m specialized in

exponential technologies

and i’ve been applying a business

transformation framework

to companies for the past two years i

now want to apply this framework

to governments to national governments

starting with lebanon

my north star is to transform

governments making them

future ready transforming governments

like you would transform

a business one way of doing this is

through the exponential organizations

framework or exo in which organizations

perform

10 times better than their peers

well-known exos are for example google

tesla airbnb and many many more

a government is somehow like a company a

company

has customers that they want to make and

keep happy

a government has citizens that they want

to make and keep happy

if suddenly all the company’s customers

decide to stop using the product or

service

the company dies the same way if a

government

loses all its citizens at once because

for some reason

they decide to migrate to a more

convenient country

there are no more taxes thus no more

need of governance

how does a government become future

ready

first the government must want to

transform

and to take risks when estonia decided

to leave frog and become today the most

advanced digital society

the decision came from the top

and there was no guarantee of success

but they did it

and today they are a role model for

other nations

second the government must define a

north star

that will serve as guiding principle

when key decisions

need to be made google’s northstar is to

organize the world’s information

ted’s northstar is ideas worth spreading

lebanon’s northstar could be the most

welcoming country on earth

third the government must implement

specific

features to become more citizen-centered

and more resilient to external changes

we’ll now look at at this features

so what is a future ready government the

first and maybe more

most important feature of a future ready

government is the community

the same way you have super hosts with

airbnb

which is an exponential organization you

will have super citizens

within future ready governments

now this is a call to all lebanese

people all over the world

and lovers of lebanese culture and

cuisine

let’s make together lebanon shine again

let’s learn from the past design the

future

in the future say where we want to be in

10 years from now

and start today the actions that will

make this happen

to build communities people must be able

to connect

so we first need to build a digital

infrastructure that can support the use

of smartphones

for voting payments etc

according to the global community

connectivity index

lebanon’s smartphone penetration and

mobile broadband access have improved

internet and computer usage have

reached new highs in 2019. however

lebanon is still behind

in advanced technology less than 10

percent of mobile users

in lebanon have access to use 4g and

moreover 3d

coverage is still poor in many areas

given that the infrastructure is already

in place

for the focus should be on installing

more sites

and expanding the coverage to all

lebanese territories

an idea to build communities for

governments to engage

with their citizens via local or

national challenges

for example by using a gamification

platform

the rewards could be in the form of a

token that could be used locally for

example at your favorite restaurant

or at the movies thus nurturing the

local economy

i also suggest to build a new digital

stable currency for lebanon

digital infrastructure estonia is the

most

advanced digital society in the world

with mobile services for almost

everything

what could lebanon and all of us learn

from estonia

they declared internet access as a human

right

can you imagine how society would thrive

if every single person on earth had

universal access to internet

now let’s look at the so-called

functionaire lifetime jobs

think of kaggle it’s a platform for data

scientists on demand

shifting to staff on demand would

completely

transform the dna of governments highly

increasing their productivity

no more lifetime jobs governments

must shift to a platform like model such

as

google and manage the offer and the

demand for its services

algorithms an algorithm is a process or

a set of rules

to be followed by a computer with the

purpose of solving a problem

imagine all the data governments already

have at hand

but used in a way that we could have

insights about the citizens businesses

feedback on government services in order

to constantly improve them

we are talking big data artificial

intelligence and

many more other exponential technologies

but very importantly governments must

ensure

total transparency and ethics to build

and keep the trust with

their citizens leverage assets

think airbnb they are the largest

hospitality company

in the world without owning a single

room the old model was to own

everything in the new model a government

keeps the cost down

it can rent space when needed or simply

put some of its

assets for rent dashboards

the same way a ceo can manage their

company

by a smartphone a head of state can do

the same with the country

she or he would have a real-time view of

the country’s metrics and

even be able to do some prediction

predictions

in the future smart cities already use

dashboards extensively

experimentation before launching

a new policy or designing public new

public services

the government should experiment by

involving the citizens and collecting

data and feedback

before to decide do we stop it or do we

do we make it mainstream

some government governments like the uk

or finland already

do this even at the eu level the

european parliament

with the future of science and

technology panel or the european

innovation

council the eic are constantly

experimenting

and involving feedback from citizens

from the main

customer let’s now look at the autonomy

of the employees future-ready

governments have a flat organization

allowing self-organizing

multi-disciplinary teams

or individual employees to operate with

decentralized authority think blockchain

think zappos that was in las vegas which

is considered to be best in class for

the autonomy of its employees

to transform governments would need to

transform the system and this opens new

opportunities for new generations to

disrupt the old model

social tools future-ready governments

use collaborative tools to manage

real-time conversations internally but

also with their citizens

you can use workplace luck there are

plenty

of tools to do that when in place those

tools create transparency and foster

community

now we’ve gone through the 10

key ingredients to to make a future

ready government

the north star the digital

infrastructure

a community staff on demand algorithms

leverage assets

dashboards experimentation autonomy

social tools

with which attribute which feature would

you start among those

10 here is an exercise for you i’d like

to invite you to reflect on your current

government where you live

and pause for a second do you think that

your government is future ready

if not how could you help make it future

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ready

you