Greg Kerr: Rewarding Balance for a Sustainable Future
This week, the TTI Interview Series covers our member Greg Kerr. Greg left government service after 12 years and started a company specializing in fast-changing environments. Following the Ebola outbreak, the team began creating off-the-grid renewable infrastructure in remote areas of Liberia.
In this interview, Greg urges to reward “balance” instead of a society out-consuming itself and its capacities. He encourages the “skunk works” which reveal themselves as armors against the heavy hand of today’s “zero fault” society, and points to the necessity to face, and therethrough proceed to tackle, negative impact.
Impact through distributing computation
Greg, share something about your work and how it intersects with the impact space.
Distributing computation to the edges of networks will catalyze a fundamental shift in how societies interact. Software operating without servers puts the power of our own large data sets into an observable state unto ourselves. Mapping detailed information about ourselves will initiate measurable observation by machines that benefit the individual.
A collective understanding of environmental balance, and social and gender justice
How would you define impact?
In a universe governed by the laws of cause and effect, all human activity has an impact. In the context of Top Tier Impact, impact means focusing activities towards a collective understanding of environmental balance, and social and gender justice.
Rewarding “balance” instead of out-consuming ourselves
Based on your experience, what do you believe is one of the most important issues that needs to be solved over the next 10 years?
Creating systems that reward “balance” is the path to solving global problems. Our current systems reward concentrated value, thereby, setting humanity to a race to out-consume itself in an ironic attempt to satisfy the requirements of the human condition. At the same time, accelerating the degradation of that same capacity to sustain life.
Mutual Credit Accounting sets the conditions for the measurement and evaluation of reciprocity, or the give and take of all relationships. Setting the conditions of wealth in a give-and-take system puts extractive industries to an extreme market disadvantage. We must out-perform “Game A” by changing the rules in “Game B.”
Pioneers in the impact space
What do you think are some of the biggest challenges in the impact space (standing in the way of providing solutions faster)?
All pioneering efforts are most vulnerable to the “unknown unknowns.” Pioneers are discouraged when they fail to predict every obstacle and operate with fear of embarrassment when the path to new systems seems long and arduous.
Framing pioneering efforts as a laboratory or “skunk works” setting, puts the proper lens of trial-and-error in the pursuit of progress. Skunk works organizations are armor against the heavy hand of the “zero fault” culture businesses face today.
A sustainable future
Greg, could you elaborate on the long-term vision you have for your work and how you measure & quantify your impact?
In the not-too-distant future our software will capture semantic data, or machine observable data, of ourselves. This data will be hosted by the devices we operate, empowering the individual with the power of machine observation and learning. Using Mutual Credit Accounting in this software, to build wealth based on the balance we create within ourselves and communities, is the bottom-up approach to progress our species needs. Agent-centric computation, analytics and currency design will raise the floor of humanity and satisfy the needs of the human condition through finding and rewarding balance. A future where wealth is calculated by the continued give-and-take of all relationships, from one’s relationship to the self and to all other things, is the basic model of employment. A future where just being human is enough to sustain being a human.
Be willing to face negative impacts
Through the work you do, have you noticed misconceptions regarding what “impact” is all about? If so, please gives us some examples.
Too often, we take the rosy view and ask ourselves “did we win?” but then fail to ask ourselves “what did we lose?”. Every action we take will have impacts, some up-front and some down the road, but there is no bad action that doesn’t cause some good elsewhere, and so, crucially, there is no good action that doesn’t cause some bad somewhere else.
Taking a hard look at negative impacts shouldn’t prevent us from moving forward from tackling problems and impacting global change. Being willing to face the negative allows us to capture and address negative impacts before they reach their crisis. To anticipate the negative effects, we must guard against such when starting the next project.
