Mae'r fath ychydig, iawn, mae'n siaradad ydw i'n dda i ddod o'n meddwl, oedd am gwrthu mewn ddweud o myll Gweithredu Sinig. Wrth gwrs ond, mae'n rhoi fynd i gan gynedau llurio gyda'n cyfrannu i gynedwch yn ei Gweithredu Sinig, a i gynnwysgach yn Gweithredu Sinig, yn ei ddweud o'r ddechrau. Yn y dweud ydw, roedd y pwysig o'r wrthlo, dwi'n mynd i'n gwrs honno yn rhael yna, Ond dyfodd yn i'w dweud y ffordd yn llunio'r gyflawn i'w Gweithredig, y Gweithredig, yr hynny'n i'w gweithio i osud i'w Gweithredig. Mae'n gweithio sydd i'w gweithio'r gweithredig yn llunio'r gyflawn i'w gweithredig, ac mae'n ddechrau'i gweithredig gwahanol yn ei gyflwylltau ond, mae arweithio gwahanol yn y bobl mae'n hwylwgfodd gyflawn i'w Gweithredig. Mae'r ffordd sgolwch yn fwyaf i'r pwysig i Italy. Yn ymddangos y Cymbraith Matysgwyd yn ymdegwyr i'r Ffyrdd yma, ac mae'r gweld yn ymdegwyr i'r rhannu islandig yn ymdegwyr i'r cyfrifiadau i South India. A gwrthodd yn gwybod i'r cyfrifiadau a'r cyfrifiadau sy'n bwysig iawn. Ond y gallwn gwneud ymdegwyr yn ei wneud yw'r ffordd o'r newydd yma. Yn ymdegwyr i'r cyfrifiadau, ymdegwyr i'r cyfrifiadau, ymdegwyr i'r cyfrifiadau, ac mae'r cyfrifiadau i'r cyfrifiadau. Ac rwyf yw choes eu cyfrwyr o'r ddlunio gyda, yn y cyfrwyr o'r ddlunio cyfrwyr o'r ddlunio cyfrwyr yma, o'r dd responsive cyfrwyr o gyfrwyr sy'n ei b Красgref i'r debyg i chi'r afael. Rwy'n gweithio'n cynllun o wybodaeth, yn y gallu gael gyrnod cyfrwyr yma, eithaf gyda'r defnyddio cyfrwyr yn y llomiddag, y ddwy teimlo, a yn rherwydd, y ddysgu'r ddlunio cyfrwyr yn dweud o'r ddlunio cyfrwyr. I want to clear some ideas for what we might need to do to jump these hurdles more consistently and frequently and pose the question where do we want to see humanitarian innovation in the future but before that I want to talk to you all about the relationship between stress and creativity and I want to ask you all a question, who is better at being creative? Is it a stressed person or is it a relaxed person? Can I have a show of hands? Who thinks it's a stressed person? Who thinks it's a relaxed person? Who doesn't know? Who's feeling a bit stressed about the question? I want to give you an answer by asking you to imagine me just before I stepped on to the stage and came into this room. Imagine me pacing the corridors outside in the Royal Society of Medicine, my palms damp. Imagine me hearing my pulse in my ears. Boom rush, boom rush, boom rush. Imagine Pete coming to say hello and my mouth being too dry to actually articulate anything in the middle. Sorry about that, Pete. But if you're outside of me you might have told me to calm down, be relaxed, you'll be fine. But this won't have necessarily helped. What usually happens when we feel like this before stressful situations is people tell us to feel calm and they don't actually help. What I try and remember to do is to tell myself I feel excited. It sounds really simple but it can lead to a really strange and sudden shift. The racing heart, the dry mouth, the sweat all change from being symptoms of anxiety to being symptoms of stimulation. Suddenly I start to feel energized by the challenge rather than depleted by the major threat you all obviously pose to me. Actually this is based on research. This isn't just some kind of self-help Bible stuff. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania prove that you can use mantras such as I Feel Excited to your advantage when you're doing something stressful. They put volunteers in a whole variety of stressful situations singing karaoke in front of strangers doing mass tests on the pressure speaking to their boss. And they wore heart monitors and they could see their heart rate on the monitor during the task. Beforehand they divided the group into thirds. One group said I feel anxious, one group said I feel calm and one group said I feel excited. And the excited group felt more confident and also performed far better than the other two. Because saying I feel calm is actually a patent lie because it contradicts the symptoms you're feeling. But it's plausible to say I'm excited because the symptoms are almost identical. By saying I'm excited the subjects were conjuring up a new mental context which changed one emotion of anxiety into another of excitement. But why did it actually make them perform better? Because they felt they were taking on a challenge rather than facing a threat. And that sets up a series of changes to the actual chemistry of the brain. Saying I feel excited is part of the software of the mind but it can change the way that our brain chemistry works. This challenge might actually put your brain into what's called an approach mode.  So in fact reinterpreted in this way stress becomes a source of positive energy in performance. And it aids performance in a whole variety of settings. And that's because a key component of stress is the neurotransmitter. And I'll try and get this right, norepinephrine, which like many of the brain's chemical messages has an inverted U shape as shown here. And this actual experiment, the related analysis, the core of an argument set up by the British psychologist and neuroscientist called Ian Robertson in his brilliant book, The Stress Effect. And in it he builds on the findings of the Yerks Dodson experiments the early 20th century which first identified this inverted U curve in performance relating stress to performance. And what Robertson does is he shows it in a whole variety of settings our performance at creative problem solving actually increases with stress up to an optimal point. Too much or too little stress causes us to underperform but in the gold lock spot in between the two lies the spot of optimal performance. So when I say I feel excited my interpretation pulls my norepinephrine levels back from their two high levels back to the peak of the inverted U sweet spot. And the right level is norepinephrine actually has remarkable properties in the brain. It acts to fertilize it, it grows new connections between neurons and even new brain cells. What's becoming clear from the work of Robertson and others is not just the hardware of the brain but how it interacts with the software of our minds that determines our sweet spot. Our thoughts and ideas, our fear of fear is a key driver of stress and at the stream the way we think in the chemistry of the brain can act as an unrelenting vicious cycle that pushes us well beyond the sweet spot. Clearly the sweet spot will vary for different people facing different problems in different situations and by extending your optimal point of stress versus your performance will be different to mine and all other things being equal. And there are four main factors that Robertson identifies. One is the subjective complexity of the task or challenge at hand. So I will find something more complex than Pete. In some settings Pete will find it more complex than he does. That subjective complexity determines how stressful we stress bigger. Our perceptions of stress are also really critical. The social context within which we operate and whether or not we have a setting in which we collectively manage stress matters a great deal. And finally skill and personality, how well we are able to manage stress as individuals, how much self belief we have, where we might sit on the spectrum between creative and how we perceive ourselves as creative individuals. I don't have time to go into detail on these but I can do so in Q&A but the key lesson is while the technical aspects of the challenges we face do matter how we balance stress and creativity is as if not more influenced by human and social factors than they are by technical factors. And this is part of a new scientific movement bringing new science and psychology and changing our understanding of the balance between pressure and creativity. And while this kind of rebalancing is necessary in all parts of human life I want you to keep this concept of the optimal point of creativity in mind because I think it's got really obvious relevance for the work we do in humanitarian innovation. And it presents both the opportunity for us in terms of how we work in humanitarian innovation but also a lens to think about how we might do things better. Because I think to date our effort has been largely focused on technical side of innovation and not really enough on the human or the social side. So having presented that let me move on now to talk about some of the hurdles that we encounter in humanitarian innovation. So what do we face as a humanitarian community? Not just MSF, the community is a whole working in the innovation space. These are the hurdles that I feel we need to overcome. They're based on research that I've done and others have done. And they are hurdles so forgive me if they seem overly critical. And they're not necessarily a comprehensive list and I'm sure you'll have your own versions but these are the ones that I think are most important. The first is system proliferation. So over the past 10 years since the first study on humanitarian innovation was published I think the humanitarian innovation movement has reinforced the tendency to focus on new tools and systems and left changing behaviours and attitudes behind. So once upon a time maybe in the early noughties we had masses of reports that no one read. And now we risk having a whole host of tools and applications that no one uses. Some of you all know this. This is a map of just a few of the mobile health monitoring projects in Uganda in 2013. Only about half of these were humanitarian nature. It was led to the Ugandan Government taking an unprecedented step of actually banning all digital health projects because of the sheer proliferation and confusion this was causing. And this is something that we can see across the humanitarian space. The result is we're seeing a large number of methods and approaches that cannot be shared outside original context and outside the original programmatic setting. It almost seems as they have struggled for years for decades to move away from cookie cutter approaches to humanitarian aid. We now are risking in the opposite direction. We have these new technologies proliferating and organisations are pursuing tailored systems for a whole host of different challenges. And it's not especially effective as the Ugandan Government showed. We also see quite a lot of unhealthy competition. The ideas of open innovation, which are now taking off in the private sector, haven't really helped us to be more collaborative in this space. Despite open innovation being part of the grand promise of humanitarian innovation. If I observe a pronounced almost accepted lack of collaboration, different organisations have their own innovation unit. Sometimes different countries within organisation movements have their own innovation unit. And every humanitarian player plans their own separate innovation furrow, often with quite a lot of replication. And so what we see is a whole host of institutionally branded innovations to crisis response. It becomes advantageous for humanitarian organisations to say this is our flagship SMS. UNICEF has one, Oxam has one, Save the Children has one. They have a few signature technologies that communicates their branding. And they use this to aggressively pursue fundraising and programming goals. And the communication of these innovations therefore lends itself more to marketing than to research and development. Innovation is more led by the marketing side of the system than by the evidence-based side of the system. And I think this has led to a dysfunctionally competitive approach to humanitarian innovation. Now of course you do need some competition in order to identify challenges and make sure you get the right solutions. But the institutionally centred approach risks the replication that's part of the wider malaise of the sector. And it runs counter-bate to the principles of humanitarian aid and also the latest thinking on innovation from the private sector. And this actually is one of the real barriers to humanitarian innovations reaching scale. It's not because they're not effective, it's because they slam into institutional interests and they're not made here syndrome so I'm not going to use it syndrome. The next challenge is expert postures. Experts, whether they're humanitarian, innovation-based technologies, medical, some of their strong positions and preconceptions. And these are often based on flawed or imperfect understanding of the challenges that we face, especially in operational settings. They might be based on slightly misguided understandings of what innovation needs and possibilities are. And because we are so many communities in the humanitarian space that what we tend to do is develop our own specific sub-community narratives about what the actual humanitarian need is. So, as a result, we tend to solve the problem we see, the medic solve the problem they see, digital fakes solve the problem they see, fundraising people solve the problem they see. And they please us and they please our immediate stakeholders, but they don't necessarily match up to the realities on the ground. The next issue is what I call the digital deluge. And every single humanitarian challenge you can think of somewhere, anywhere in the world, it's somewhere being dealt with by someone developing it out. As a Chair of the Humanitarian Innovation Fund, over seven years, over 50% of the applications to the fund were digital in nature. And they're often the least thought through and the least focused on humanitarian needs. And I think that instead of, as Marianne Twenette famously said about starving French peasants who wanted bread, let them eat cake, race now seem to be saying, let them eat data. And we seem to have gone from the situation of not enough data to being overloaded with data. And every app that we develop generates more data. And there's this assumption that data is just somehow down the road going to get used by humanitarian decision makers. But we actually have a profound lack of capacity to analyse and use the data. And we find it very hard to know how to verify it for objectivity or compare it. So as a result, the apps generate data, it looks very nice. You can put it in a fundraising report, you can put it on the front cover of the economist if you like. But it doesn't actually generate much for us. And what I think we've gone is from weak non-existent data to weak big data. Some of this can be analysed to generate insights for decision makers, but it seldom happens real time in a way that can really operate informed operations. And I think there's a whole range of issues. Let's say when data is used, it can lead to faulty thinking, misguided responses, misleading reporting results. It can give a full sense of reality to senior managers who far from the field and don't actually know what's going on. The numerous examples recently have a quite high profile of disregard for the rights and privacy of data-affected communities. There's quite a few incidents of that. And while there's a lot of talk of big data in the humanitarian future of the humanitarian sector, and I think there is a lot of promise, I think the reality more closely resembles the quip by the economist Dan Ariely, who said big data is a bit like teenage sex. Everyone talks about it, nobody really knows how to do it.  New tools in old paradigms. Innovation reliance can actually serve to reinforce existing mindsets, cultures and approaches. The classic example with innovation studies is Henry Ford saying, if I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse, not a car. And I think actually much humanitarian innovation has been within the confines of existing assumptions, existing operating models, existing stakeholders. We're not on the whole doing double loop learning that asks why are we doing these things and how can we do this better? We're rigidly sticking to, we aren't saying are we doing the right things, we're saying are we doing things right? And as a result our efforts tend to be more limited, they're much more about incremental adjustments. If Henry Ford came along he would say you've basically got a whole series of faster horses. Innovation cliffs, this is another major hurdle. I think most of humanitarian innovations end their lives a bit like this, falling dramatically off the end of a funding cliff. And the complaints from those involved say a lack of resources, a lack of belief, a lack of commitment. But actually what happens is that you've got these lovely processes which say you need to recognise a problem, you need to analyse it, you need to develop a solution, you need to test it, then you need to implement it. But very few ideas actually go down all the way through the pipeline. A research which we did back in 2015 identified that innovation spend of bilateral agencies, it's obviously not that relevant to MSF, but it came in at less than 0.01% of the overall humanitarian budget. But that isn't actually the issue. The issue is that innovation budgets in private sector organisations are used to reorient the rest of the budget. So if you have 5% on innovation you know that in the future that 5% could transform the other 95% of the way your business operates. That's the point of having an innovation budget. But the challenge in the humanitarian sector is that our budget doesn't have that flexibility built in. It's not reoriented towards changing the way that we do things. So you can spend as much as you like on the humanitarian innovation side, if it doesn't have clear pathways into changing the way you do the rest of your business, it's going to be really problematic. We dismiss end users. We have a continued tendency to Chris Crisey's impacted communities down the road and the hope that someone else will pick up the ball and no one ends up doing it. And in our valuations we say the same thing we said in the last 30 years, we should have engaged more with communities. And we need to just work harder at doing it. And in the rush towards humanitarian innovation, there's not been nearly enough emphasis on actors in developing countries, whether it's communities themselves, whether it's civil society, whether it's private sector and government bodies. And there's a whole range of related issues. It's not just their engagement with the systems we build, which we assume will be infinitely available and infinitely compliant. But there's also issues of access to technology, selection, voice and representation, ethics and risks. And the importance of not just engagement, which we talk a lot about, but empathy is really critical. A user-centered design in the private sector talks a lot about empathy and I wonder how much we actually spend time thinking about empathy with disaster-affected communities when we're thinking about innovation. Now actually doing this gratifyingly doesn't require importing a whole series of new tools from the private sector, because we've got a whole range of pod-specary tools at our fingertips. I think the real mystery of user-centered design with affected people is not how to do it, but why so few humanitarian innovations have done so. And I'll be giving some examples of people of that. I actually tried to address this issue a little bit later. The final hurdle I want to talk about is, and this is one of the best images I've... It is a genuine one as well. Context will have its revenge. We have an institutionalised, almost legitimised lack of attention to contextual factors. The history of humanitarian aid is largely one of flawed attempts to cut and paste new ideas and context with little attention to how they actually fit in. And the current efforts in humanitarian innovation haven't been immune to these established cultural and organizational norms within aid. We don't pay attention to infrastructure to local availability of resources to train into capacity. We often forget that simpler is better. We tend to treat existing methods and new approaches as all our competitors rather than compliments. A really good example, most people in developing countries use radio as their most widespread technology. When we go in mobile phones, we don't think about, well, how can we combine mobile phones with radio? That's a really good example of people that do that, but actually we should be doing that as a matter of course, instead of just going in with our smartphones because this is going to change your lives. And context will eventually come to bite us on the backside, proverbially speaking. I say these are some big hurdles for us all, and there may be more. And some of these may need to change over time as we learn more, but my name isn't to be negative, but to be really clear headed about what we need to navigate and overcome. And as the O-line says, I used to be scared of hurdles, but I got over them. Sorry. You can blame my seven-year-old son for that one. I blame him for a lot of things that you don't know. The problem is we don't actually appear to be learning how to jump these hurdles. Instead we just seem to repeatedly crash into each one as we go into each new innovation project. And this is in part because I don't think we're being especially open and transparent about what we're learning. As usual, Dilbert has a cartoon that sums up this situation. I hope you can all read this. I apologise if you feel like 15 drunken monkeys is too close to comfort as an allergy for our sector. But I think there is something here about just how we present what we're doing in the innovation space to the wider world compared to how we're actually doing it. Say, one of the first starting points for me in starting research on my new book was to refer to research in this area. Research in this area does exist. It starts with a study I led back in 2008, which has just been described as a foundational text for the movement, something I like to repeat as often as possible, obviously. But the research speaks to many of these challenges. But I wonder how much of it's actually being used to change the way we do humanitarian innovation. Much of the research has ended up being aspirational rather than operational, and it's seldom, if ever, used to assess and evaluate programmes and apply lessons. For example, in the very first study we said we recommended humanitarian innovation needs to be open and non-competitive by default. And today there's innovation competition even between different country officers of the same international organisations. So I wonder how evident space we are in reality when we do this work. I don't think there's really enough strategic learning, and that strategic learning isn't really feeding into how we do innovation. And therefore we're not really being able to clearly articulate how our ambitions in this space match up to humanitarian objectives. There are some notable exceptions to this lack of learning. The ALNAP report, more than Just Luck, on the reddit, I'd really urge you to do so because I think it really talks about the challenges in a clear-headed way. And it deepens our understanding of the success factors for humanitarian innovation. It talks about greater attention to the how of humanitarian innovation, not just the what. It talks about the fact that humanitarian responders need support that speaks to their specific capabilities and their interests and their ability to work and be creative in crisis settings. Speaking back to that point about balancing stress and creativity. We actually need to urgently improve our culture for innovation, but we can be innovative in the humanitarian sector if leaders give us the space to do that and encourage us to do that. And that culture is something that we all need to contribute to. And we don't really think that much about our organisational culture, I think. And we obviously need much greater attention to address problems from the perspective of affected people themselves. This is a quote from John Besant, who's one of the leading UK experts on innovation, and he's been instrumental in shaping the way innovation works in the humanitarian sector and was actually part of the chair of the humanitarian innovation fund with me for a number of years. And he said that while humanitarian invasions might be rich in goodwill, they often lack the core skills needed to turn right in to something that creates real sustainable value. And the challenge is how do you learn about the discipline, the skills of innovation and how to manage it on particularly difficult conditions and limited resources with a lack of control. And in my view, this actually is central. It reinforces the point I was making earlier about the human social sides of humanitarian innovation. We're simply not thinking enough about the importance of people. And we often undervalue the potential of people to lead and undertake innovation processes. But this is not the way things have to be. So in my research for my new book, which is called Crisis Innovators, I've looked at crisis innovators in a whole range of different settings and I've looked at it historically as well as in the modern day. I've looked at it close to home in areas like humanitarian, in emergency services, in disease response. And I've also looked at it in more further field, in military and in space. And building on the work of innovation scholars, Clayton Christensen, who wrote the work book of the innovators' dilemma, I've tried to focus on the key behaviours that optimise the creative impulse within people and within organisations. Now they've had a number of skills that I think are especially essential for the innovation in different crisis settings and I've met them to 50 different case studies in different contexts and different time periods. People that have responded to crisis and creative in innovative ways and some of these, as I've shown, have gone on to make remarkable changes in the world as a result. And they're challenges, challenges of people who are able to constructively challenge and question the status quo. Crafters, they're people who are really deeply steeped in how things work and are able to come up with novel solutions. Combinas are people who work across different technical areas and they're able to bring together ideas from those areas in a systematic way. And this is a remarkable network building. This is if I was going to be anything in this space, that would be me. Corroborators, not in the legal sense, but in the evidence-based sense of people who are really thirsty for data and information. And conductors, not in the bus sense, but in the orchestration sense, people are able to bring all these things together. Let me talk you through these quickly now. And this is someone that might be named to you. A good example of a challenge at Steve Collins. Steve Collins, a doctor and an aid worker and he was running a nutrition programme in the 1990s and he was well aware of the job at hand. He was only in his mid-30s at the time, but he was an expert in tackling malnutrition by establishing therapeutic feeding centres. These large centres where malnourish patients were admitted for an average of 30 days. And Somalia in 1990 was putting charge of the first adult feeding centres anywhere in the world since the Second World War and the liberation of the death gaps. And he actually published his work in the prestigious Nature Journal. I think he was one of the youngest people to have had a single authored piece in nature up until that point. In 1996, in Liberia, there was a cholera outbreak amongst the patients that he was dealing with and the communities around them. And it led him to rethink this way of working because essentially when he set up a therapeutic feeding centre, people come from miles around, they create informed communities, the famous images of the April of 1980s where people had brought their children to the feeding centres and they created an informal settlement around them. And that's what led to the cholera outbreak. And this to him, as he put it, brought home to me the danger of bringing people together in this way in feeding centres. They had to be a better way. I knew this would come from engaging people better, looking at their strengths rather than trying to impose solutions on them. And this is exactly what he did. So using the latest nutritional products, Steve and colleagues at Validia International developed a new means of treating malnutrition that proved five times more effective than conventional mathematics at a fraction of the cost. And today, following extensive roll-up, a lot of opposition from organisations like MSF and UNICEF and others that were really supporting the previous way of doing things, but it was tested at a whole range of different settings. The reason it was able to be tested is because the Ethiopian Government banned therapeutic feeding centres in 2002 and he was therefore able to get them with an alternative that was seen as ethical. And it's now been claimed by the WHA as being at the forefront of dealing with malnutrition of the world around the world. Something like the death rates of treatments have dropped from something in the region of 30% to 40% mortality rates down to less than 10%. And as a result, it's become the standout illustration of humanitarian innovation. But it's the human story that I want to focus on. It's not just what he achieved, but it's a recognition that there had to be a better way of doing things. And even though his expertise was embedded within the existing approach. And this is really at the heart of the challenge of mentality. Now, obviously many of us have had this experience in operational response but few of us have the time or the space of the resources or the institutional space to do something about it. As a result, a lot of challenge mentality doesn't really go anywhere and I think we need to find a way of channeling in that better. So challenges like Steve they constructively question the status quo, their iconoclass and that they're willing to burn the icons literally. They redefine problems in new ways and they're willing to put their own reputation and status on the line. And what was especially important with Steve is the degree of empathy and engagement with communities that for him it was about the plight of parents and their ability and their capability to look after children better using what in medical terms as an outpatient system for dealing with malnutrition was essentially a community-based home-based approach. This is Caetano Doria. He's a professor at the Department of Civil Engineering at Caetano Doria. He's a great example of a crafter. He works on the interface of environment and public health and he works with Oxfam and UNICEF and a whole range of others. I'm sure a number of you work on water quality. Many of you will know their important trade-offs to be struck between quality and quantity of water. The transmission of water in excreta related diseases as is likely to be to the lack of sufficient quantities of water for domestic and personal hygiene as to contaminated water sources. But what he's discovered over the years of research is that it's key to get a safe water supply that's both free of pathogens technically but it's also aesthetically and culturally appropriate. It's visually clear. It doesn't have a taste. It doesn't have an odor. That cultural appropriate varies considerably between different communities and cultures. He found that the vast majority of purification kits simply didn't pay attention to they weren't technically compatible to start off with fuel conditions. There were often very innovative approaches developed by the private sector to the humanitarian sector and they were fine in lab conditions but they weren't very effective. But they didn't necessarily produce water that was culturally appropriate. So what he did over a number of years was to steep himself in humanitarian realities to try and better understand how communities used and perceived water and the kinds of processes that could be utilised. Based on this deep analysis he actually found a number of features of conventional water treatments that could be made better use of. A particular approach which brought together two aspects. One is inclined plain settling and coagulants. One is a chemical process to essentially gather particles in contaminated water and filter it quicker. One is a particular origami style approach that enables you to filter them. This led to a whole range of different applications made to be in South Sudan working with a local government body in charge of water infrastructure and it showed that this was called an inclined plain settler succeeded in delivering a measurable improvement of other water treatment systems both in terms of sufficient, acceptable quality maximum quantity over time and cost and the tools actually won awards for its potential to contribute to water security and it's one of the ones we supported in the humanitarian innovation plan. Now crafters like Doria exhibit some common features. They have a deep engagement with underlying processes and patterns that are faced by disaster affected communities. They have an obsession not just with their particular area but not just with the functional side of things but also the social, the emotional, the behavioural side the understanding that clean water goes beyond technical to the cultural. And they use this understanding to craft and adapt novel solutions to match emergency context and social situations. Combine as a third type and I'm going to take a step back into more recent history. This is UU2. Does anyone know who she is? Anyone ahead of her? Okay, one. So imagine 1967. Only one government research project was supported by Chairman Mao in China called Project 523 and it was a result of a personal request from the Vietnamese Premier Ho Chi Minh to essentially keep his allied troops combat ready during the ongoing war with the United States. Vietnamese soldiers at that time had a say we're not afraid of the American imperialists but we are afraid of malaria. And the imperialists were far from new. In 1964, malaria related casualties amongst the US forces was five times greater than the casualties from direct combat. In the following year, nearly half of all American military personnel, 800,000 men were infected. So as a result, malaria became a top priority for dealing with, for both sides. In America it was the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in DC that launched the hunt for antimalarial drugs and it launched a massive investment. Thousands and thousands of researchers huge and they tested a quarter of a million different possible drugs. The Chinese project had 600 scientists as a fraction of the resource on the US side. It launched on the 23rd of May 1967 which gave it the project name Project 153. And although none of them knew it at the time the project would be something of a protection against the persecutionary zeal of the Cultural Revolution a malarial arc for scientists and researchers is what someone described to us. But in 1969, the project had looked at thousands of possible drugs when they success and the Walter Reed on the US side also had no success. And at this point, the Chinese government brought in the Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine and UU2 who was a young herbologist there at the time and she was a pointed director of the overall project because she understood both sides having had some medical training. And her project started with a four month trip to Hainen a tropical island at the southernmost point of China and when she was there when she returned she was deeply affected by the plight of the people there and she said I saw a lot of people who were in the late stages of malaria and those kids died very very quickly. I really thought I had to do something about this. It gave a really deep sense of empathy and purpose and motivation which was linked to the people that she met. What was essential from UU2's perspective was that it would have two wings. It would have the traditional medicine the herbology side and the biochemical side a biomedical side. One group was tasked to test and synthesize drugs and the other was tasked to examine traditional Chinese medicines. And the different teams had to constantly combine ideas and constantly come together in order to smash ideas together. So one imagined one team screening ancient medical texts and the other working on chemical isolation of different active ingredients. And there were more than 2,000 different preparations that were tested by UU2's team. And eventually there was a plant called Sweet Wormwood that was identified and it was described in a centuries-old document. And the active ingredient was discovered by UU2 after a long process of trial and error and cross-team work. And it was synthesized by Project 523 and is now known as Artemisinin which I'm sure many of you will know. And it showed promising tests in mice and monkeys and UU2 actually volunteered to be the first human recipient. She said, I'm the leader, I should take responsibility. And it had no effect so they tried it on infected labors in Henan and the symptoms disappeared within two days. Her role was actually not widely publicised at the time. The researchers eventually published in the 70s and they came to work thanks to the work of the WHO and at the Walter Reed. And there were numerous tests in large-scale production efforts and Artemisinin moved to the centre stage of the global effort against resurgent malaria thanks actually to the work of MSF in testing and applying in a whole range of settings out quite far from where it is being applied. And today although there are issues around resistance data at Artemisinin the chance of dying from malaria in severe cases is a half from 1 in 5 to 1 in 10 the number of deaths have reduced by 75% and that's from around 2 million deaths globally in 2000 to 500,000 in 2013. And in 2015 UU2 became the first Chinese national to win a Nobel Prize for Science. She shared the prize for medicine. And when she, she's a very modest person she said, she, she was quoted saying it was a bit of a surprise but not too much of a surprise. So, combiners like UU2 they draw ideas across different fields and endeavours and they generate new associations and they're really focused on combinations of different skills. And they engage in brick a large what you might call LEGO thinking. And again the importance of empathy in creating shared goals and helping to navigate dramatic collaborators. I'm just conscious of the time and I've got a bit to go. Collaborators shall I just keep going? Okay, great, thank you. Collaborators perhaps appropriately it's not a individual but a team of people. This is the speed programme in the Philippines and this was developed after Typhoon Katsala. This is the first ever mobile based health surveillance system to go to national scale anywhere in the world. And I think it might still be the only one actually. But it was after Typhoon Katsala in 2009 in the world's biggest leptospheriosis outbreak in Manila and it highlighted the need for better disease outbreak preparedness. And it's developed an early warning system for post disaster situations to spot immediate potential disease outbreaks. And it used web based software that would get in data from mobile phones and handheld applications and it enabled the transmission of syndromic disease fairness information from primary reporting units of vacation centres to the health system up to the national level. And it was actually designed by the government in collaboration with civil society in the private sector but in collaboration with the humanitarian sector. And the emphasis across the consortium was that the actors had to build relationships with each other. They knew that if they just left it to the humanitarian sector they would come up with a system that was basically lasted as long as the crisis response then got forgotten. So they had to find a system where the battle could be passed on and there was a central importance of building relationships with each other with local governments with community based organisations. And it wasn't for this relational work this system wouldn't have gone to national scale. And I think there's some really key lessons here around basically the ecosystem. We have very few incentives within the system for actually doing this kind of system-wide work. And I think expecting this might be asking emergency responders to try and help to reform building kits. And I think a small sport experiment is quite useful here. Had speed been developed solely by the humanitarian sector one can imagine it would have been deployed once and forgotten by the next emergency. Instead it's a standing mechanism which is used after every emergency. So collaborators like the speed grid they bring together different groups around shared goals and opportunities and gaps. And they identify win-win-win solutions. The private sector was involved here. There were resources from this. The government was involved. The WHO was involved. Humanitarians were involved. And I think everyone had to find a way of negotiating their wins in this process. And the key is drawing unusual suspects who might not be seen as typically humanitarian. I think we have this notion that we in the humanitarian sector have a monopoly on the term humanitarian. But actually I think we need to break that monopoly. I think anyone can be humanitarian in the right context. The next example, he did originally have MSF here as the corroborators par excellence. But I thought that would be a bit too much like trying to flatter you all. So I'm going to tell the story of Archie Cochran who's a so-called father of evidence-based medicine. And the Cochran collaboration for randomised control trials is named in his honour. And very quickly he was experienced during the war. He was in the Royal Army Medical Corps as a captain. He participated in military action where he was captured. And he spent the rest of the war years as a prisoner of war with the speciality of medical officer in a whole range of refugee camps. And this is where he performed one of the first ever medical trials using randomised methods. At the time, randomisation and trials were mainly used in agriculture not in medicine. And what led him to conduct the trial was this high-end incidence of ankylidema of unknown origin amongst the prisoners. And it developed edema even up to above the knee. It was looking really quite grim. And he hypothesised that the underlying cause was vitamin deficiency as the prisoners were provided with really scanty nutritional levels around 500 calories per day. And he expressed his concerns to the German leaders of the camps and they refused to help. And so he brought yeast in the form of marmite and vitamin C supplements from the black market in the camp and selected a sample of prisoners and he divided them into two and he gave one group daily portions of yeast and the other group daily portions of vitamin C and limited their water intake and measured the frequency of urination and after four days he said the yeast eating group had improved and so he then wrote all this down and went to the German camps and they said we need more yeast and the German camp managers rejected him and left him feeling really frustrated and furious. But then a young German doctor picked it up and said the evidence is incontrovertible. If we don't supply vitamins to the prisoners then it's a war crime and say they got vitamin B12 and they supplied it and the prisoners recovered and the incidents of pitting edoma dropped dramatic. Now he actually wrote about this later on and he talked about it as his first worst and most successful trial ever and I think it was quite interesting. I mean it can be thought to be both randomised and controlled. At the time RCT is almost unknown to the medical community his story of doing this was one of the things that actually inspired people in the 40s and 50s to start doing trials more effectively. So corroborators like Archie Cochran they test, observe and gather data they probe and explore things in systematic fashion through experiments and they play a central role in making the case and advocating for change. The final example of the personality type I want to talk about is the conductor I want to talk about the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast. It's still to this day the largest hospital in Belfast and it was seen as being right on the forefront of the battle and in 1969 when the trouble started no one had seen a gunshot wound and by 1973 it became a hub for the development a whole range of groundbreaking techniques that would transform emergency medicine and military medicine around the world and they met a whole range of different challenges one was political and they actually put in place their own principle that they would treat all sides equally whether they were perpetrators or victims or they were army or the military or the paramedics or the people they'd treat them all equally to get the best possible care. Nurse O Hanlon who's the chief nurse actually said all we want to do is what happened in relation to the injuries we're not interested in politics. On the technical side the research and teaching hospital there was bolted on to the A&E team so they were able to take on board the kinds of injuries and ailments that are happening and they had frontline staff directly leading the development of new techniques and led to new techniques for everything from dealing with lung collapse of bomb victims integrating dental filling techniques into cranial surgery using titanium cranioplasty triage techniques which are still used today across hospitals in the UK and around the world for the rubberford techniques named after the head of the A&E unit there and it was a spirit of constructive engagement but I think perhaps the most important there was a kind of emotional and social support led by Mary led by sister Kate O Hanlon they drew upon this nation that we needed to be able to face up to the horror of the troubles with creativity rather than convention as she wrote there wasn't counselling because we were all together you had porters and nurses and doctors and consultants and we would all talk together every day and there was a great team spirit and she was instrumental in creating this environment in which this innovation could happen. William Rutherford who was knighted subsequently and running the department actually said the principles are very simple you have to love everybody, you have to listen to everybody and if and doubt you do what sister O Hanlon tells you and conductors, they spot the trouble problems and they ensure they channeled and addressed in appropriate ways and they ensure there is a right balance of skills and sequence of skills and they maintain a sense of mission all of this to my mind adds up to an argument for a shift in how we think about humanitarian innovation so my own Mia Culper here when I wrote the first study on humanitarian innovation I wanted to make the case for to make investing more money in it and in the sector I knew that talking about people wasn't necessarily going to get us there so I focused on a process focused approach and it seemed much more likely to attract attention and resources and this kind of process was what we put forward and this is what we essentially got lots of resources we got the humanitarian innovation fund we got ideas to move through these different things and so on but today I'm convinced that if we're going to be successful we need to rebalance this with a people-centered approach to how we think about innovation we can't think just about the process of innovation like it's a pipeline and a factory we need to think about the skills and the capabilities and how we orchestrate them together like the players of instruments in a band and we need to think about our role within that the image of the lone innovator is just one part of we need to in a way democratise innovation across our sector and between our sector and those we seek to help and again I think a people-centered approach is really important here so what would this look like in practice so I think a few ideas first of all we need to operate from the affected community backwards and not from the agency forwards we need to develop the capabilities to anticipate and interpret emerging needs and opportunities and we need to respond to them not with technologies but with empathy and with principles we need to empower teams to make collective decisions on a shared understanding of purpose and values and importantly with emotional openness between us to talk about the challenges that we're facing and yes we do need to adapt and continuously test a whole range of tools and possible ideas and models to ensure relevance and we need to foster new kinds of partnerships and networks to achieve goals in a highly collaborative fashion let me quickly try and sum up what I've said so there's been progress in humanitarian innovation and some non-trivial hurdles there's more evidence based learning is necessary and impossible but we have to remember that humanitarian innovation is much about the human and the social side is about the technical and the technological and there's some great people and some great teams and some great examples and some emerging archetypes that might help us rebalance this approach and I just want to close with just going back to the point that I started with I think humanitarian innovation could be at its best a point towards the kind of professional institutional mindsets we need to have in place to work on humanitarian challenges both now and in the future it's a way of furthering understanding of opening up new ways of seeing and thinking of unlocking our individual and collective capabilities in the face of destruction and devastation just to go back to the point about stress and creativity I started with there are some downsides to stress obviously it can lead to over stress but the brilliant thing about this development is that across a whole range of problems well managed stress doesn't actually lower our creative abilities it advances them and a whole range of examples where successful innovators have been able to tap into this already without knowing about it what the human focus does it enables is to see constraints not as restrictions but as a source of freedom and I think we in the humanitarian community could see innovation as doing the same thing freeing ourselves of dogma and hopefully pointing the way to a new kind of humanitarian enterprise that should be the kind of thing we see in the 21st century more open, more honest, more dynamic more engaged, more networked an enterprise we can point to with pride instead of down quick discomfort thank you very much for listening


For more videos on people's struggles, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. For the past nine days, massive protests against police brutality have been held across Nigeria. For the past nine days, Nigeria has witnessed massive protests against police brutality. Thousands took to the streets in a show of anger against the ever-increasing police violence. At least 10 people are reported to have been killed in police repression of the protest itself. The protesters are demanding the dissolution of the SARS units of the police and an end to all forms of police brutality in the country. The federal special anti-robbery squad or the SARS was formed in Nigeria in 1992 to stop armed robberies. However, in the past decades, it has been accused of various crimes including extrajudicial killings, torture, corruption and robbery. The key demands of the protests include the immediate release of all-arrested protesters, justice for those killed by police brutality and compensation for their families, an independent body to investigate and prosecute misconduct, independent psychological assessments and new training for dismissed SARS officers who want redeployment, and a pay rise for police so they are adequately compensated for protecting lives and property of citizens. The current round of protests started after video footage of SARS officers dragging and killing people went viral in early October. While the initial protests were small, the police responded with the use of heavy force to suppress the protesters. Tier gas and live fire were used against them at several places. In a new report titled Time to End Impunity, Amnesty International documents at least 82 cases of torture, ill treatment and extrajudicial execution by SARS between January 2017 and May 2020. Several well-known personalities including British Nigerian actor John Boega and singer Davido have come out in support of the protests. Under pressure, the government announced the dissolution of the SARS on October 11. While making the announcement, President Mohamadu Buhari also announced extensive police reforms in the country. However, the protests have not let up due to widespread mistrust among the people. Protesters argued that the government promised similar reforms on several locations in the past as well. They have demanded a comprehensive review and investigation into the working of the entire police system as well as punishment for those involved in criminal activity against the people. The apprehensions of the protesters were justified on Tuesday when the police announced the creation of an alternative special weapons and tactics unit or the SWAT. Protesters called it a replacement of SARS and an attempt to rehabilitate the accused police officers.


Hey, this is Christian Buck with another MVP Buzz Chat and I'm here today with Joel. Hey, good afternoon. Good afternoon, Christian. Good to finally meet you in person here or in person remotely, I should say. That's right. Yeah. Well, this is the new normal if this is in person. So, yeah.  I'm based in South Carolina and I work for Atachi Solutions. I've been an MVP for 13 years now, I think it is. About where the discs are about to start falling off of the trophy or whatever. You've got the two blue rings. Yeah. Yeah. I've got the two blue rings. I'm about about two years away from the third one. Yeah. Then when you reach the third one, then you got to decide, do I take the blue rings out to make them fit or do I maybe go stack them along the top? Lay it sideways. You've got more surface there. Yeah. I mean, people that don't know where you're talking about here. Now, I don't know about you, like when was your first MVP award, Christian? 2012. Okay. So, my first one was 2008. I'm not saying that because I've been for a long time, but they didn't start the ring. I think that's what that's called. Yeah. Yeah. That was my humble brag. Exactly. But they didn't start the rings until 2010. And so, I have two missing rings and it irks me to no end because the complete is that I hate seeing like ring, ring, ring, five years that it just, it, I need to find somebody who can, who can fabricate those rings and make me a 2008. Three. You don't have access somewhere for two, a 3D printer? I'm sure. I, I, I, that's a good thought and you should 3D, 3D printer or something. Yeah. So, I've originally was awarded for dynamic CRM and if you know anything about the business applications world, that has now grown significantly to also, also factory and power platform. So I'm considered a business applications MVP. And so, It's become a hot property over there because it's, so I'm trying to remember when the Microsoft acquired all the dynamic stuff. So I was of an employee at 2006. So it happened right, right down there at the sometime, right, right around that time. Yeah. It was actually, and this, this is going to date me significantly, but it was early 2000s and actually dynamic CRM was a kind of an organic product that they, they developed themselves. The others like AX, which is now FNL and the vision and GP, they acquired all those but dynamic CRM, that was something, I mean, they built with partners, but it was really. Okay. I didn't, I didn't realize that. I thought that also came to the great pins acquisition, but all right. Yeah. Yeah.  And so that's where the power platform world is just, is still a little bit bifurcated where a lot of the like power apps grew out of SharePoint. The SharePoint was the first platform to adopt flow as its main workflow engine. And so as a result, a lot of the initial MVPs were on the, on the SharePoint side. And then when they brought in CDS 2.0 in 2018, that opened the door for dynamics people and there still is a little bit of a bifurcation there where people who came to it from a SharePoint side are trying to use Office. Now we've got CDS and then you've got the CRM people who are, don't really understand the office world as much as we're, we're, we're learning and I'm kind of bridging both worlds now. So, you know, we're delivering, delivering power apps to customers that don't have CDS as well as people that have CDS and dynamics. And I think that vision is increasingly coming clear and becoming more reunified thing. Yeah. That's, that's, I was going to ask you about that with your, your experience. I mean, so there's like, so here in where I am in Utah, of course, we've got a number of small, you know, SIs, consulting firms that have been long time SharePoint businesses and doing a lot of that, that kind of work. Well, as custom SharePoint, a lot of the on-prem work and that all has gone kind of down and, and some of them have retooled. Well, the large, one of the larger vendors in, in town, a company called Journey Team, they've shifted over. They shifted a few years back over to the dynamics. The business is booming. Right.  And, and they're really just, they're growing leaps and bounds on the other side of the business. And they're, you know, I don't know, they're going to double here. But well, before all this pandemic stuff happened, they, they were going to like almost double in employees this year. So, wow. Yeah, it's, it's something that, and I think that's where kind of realization to me is, you know, the average, I think the average dynamics implementation is in the, is in the hundreds of users, you know, it's, it's, you've got some of their small, some SMC stuff, but probably the average that we see for dynamics deployment is somewhere in the 500 to a thousand users. And then they've got some that are 3,000, 5,000. I mean, but we're, we're talking power apps deployments that are in the 10,000 or more users. And that's where Microsoft really sees this platform as even a much bigger pool or bigger opportunity than what business applications have been for them. And they have so much legacy stuff out there with InfoPath and access and Excel and all that other stuff that there's plenty of opportunity. But the realization is, you know, the, the initial power apps for a lot of personal productivity stuff, which are great. And I, I mean, I've built the food tracker app for myself and things like that. But the reality is that's not the real opportunity. It's not the free or, you know, not the five user, you know, productivity type apps. It's the opportunity to have somebody have a time sheet out that's used by 20,000 people. You know, that's the real opportunity. Right. Well, I guess the next question is about the stuff that you do in the day to day job. And then, so how, you know, what are you, what are you primarily focused on, what kind of projects are you're seeing? You know, that, that's always a good sign of the adoption and what's happened out in industry is, you know, what, what projects are the consulting company is starting to pick up. So I'd be, you know, my job has changed somewhat in that, you know, I've been, I've had almost every job on our, on our CRM team, use the old term, except for, except for being a project manager, I'll be a terrible project manager.   Yeah, yep, it's the worst part of that job is, is chasing people for status updates. Yes. Yes. This is the, this is my quote for every project manager. I'm concerned. Yeah, you're, you, that's right. You have a responsibility for everything. They got to see the icebergs that are coming. You know, the poster I have on my wall over here. I mean, at my heart, I'm a, I'm a solution architect. It's the despair.com poster problem, no matter how great and destructive your problems may seem now. Remember, you've probably only seen the tip of them. I love that one. Yeah, but I was saying at my heart, I'm a, I'm a solution architect, which means I am not a developer. I've never claimed to be a developer, dabbled in it, but I never had, it's kind of the same reason I'm not an accountant. I don't like to go through a problem at the granular level. I like to jump to the solution and design what, what it looks like. But I, so, but my job has now changed. So I'm the principal power platform architect for Hitachi North America. So that means that I'm setting the vision for how can we bridge these worlds and how can we, you know, grow? And we've seen tremendous growth with power, automate power apps. We have another group that does Power BI. I've never, I've done reporting, but it's not my main focus. Yeah. There are, there are a few other Hitachi MVPs, aren't there? Yeah. We actually have more business applications, MVPs than any other partner and hasn't been that way forever. But, um, yeah, some of them have come as, it's like the more MVPs that we've, we've grown organically, the more want to come work for us because they realize that we support MVPs and the things that MVPs like to do, like speaking at conferences when there's not endemics going on, they're, you know, doing podcasts and other things like that. You know, I see a lot of leading partners sabotage themselves by having the social media police and everything that people post has to be branded with rah, rah, my company. But what we found is you get a lot more, you get a lot more mileage from just having people who are great people who know what they're talking about. And if you have somebody speaking at Ignite or other things like that, that's a much better, that's a much better advertisement for your company than posting canned things that your marketing department has put out. Well, people see through the, it's about authenticity. And people, you know, recognize it. I mean, I had this, I don't know if you remember the company I worked for a, was based in Seattle, but working for Boston based Acceler. And, and they, they were fantastic and their attitude towards, they said, look, I don't understand a lot of this stuff, but they were, as we started, we're measuring, and I remember having a conversation with their VP of sales about a year after they acquired the little company that I was working for in Seattle. And, and he said, you know, hey, want to apologize. Now, which were like, must have been poison out of his mouth to say that. Now, good friend, but he, he said, you like, we're seeing the data now, like we're seeing now the impact of the, I was the chief evangelist for it, but it was your product marketing and, and he says, we're, we see that your, your hand in almost every single sale that we make. So we were seeing now the impact of those different pieces. You know, attribution is a difficult thing to, to measure, but they, in fact, they, when they hired a new CMO, and the first thing she said was, you know, look, this is, I may not agree with some of the things that you're, you're doing dollars spent, like, but the results are there. We're not going to change anything. In fact, I want you to do more of what you, what you're doing, which was fantastic support. And, and I found most other organizations that I've worked with, that there, that's been more, you know, the other executives have been, you know, been jealous of that because they don't understand how that works. And then, like you said, they want to go and brand everything you must be wearing our logo.  It must be through our site. I mean, kind of all those kinds of problems. And they, they kill it. People see right through that. It's not authentic. It doesn't allow for the natural interaction of your people, no matter what their role is, to, to interact with the community. And it kills it. It stops it. Yeah. Well, I think I've, what I've experienced is, is that too. And I've had times where I've had in other companies management that wasn't supportive of that. But I'm, I'm a fan of Jack O'Willink and he talks about leadership leading forward.   But, you know, I think if it is possible, and I have seen it happen firsthand for you to train your employer, in other words, show them, hey, here's the value that comes and, you know, and, and do that. But it saddens me sometimes when I see certain partners that used to be really strong, you'd go to the user group summit or you would go to Ignite or back when I had convergence and they had a lot of people that really knew what they were talking about. And now you go and there's all these just marketing people, right? Just, it just is not, I don't see how that that's effective or it's much more effective to use the best asset you have, which is your people. Right. Well, it's, it's funny. So I had, I remember, you know, so I had my MVP for, so this must have been like 2013, 2014 and somebody came up, I was doing like, I think one of the SharePoint Fest events or something. And after I presented on a topic and came up and said, I have no idea what your company does.  It was like an administrator. But I said, well, I said, that's the thing. I said, I, there was zero pitch in any of my presentations. I would go and talk about actual problems. Hey, this is what the gaps are in the product. Here's what needs to be there. And, and so even though I was, I was trying to be and this is the guidance for anybody that wants to, you know, like create content and do things that maybe they feel that they're on the path. They want to become an MVP or they just want to give back to the community, but doing it in a way that's not heavy handed towards your product or service. Here's the secret is that everybody knows that you work for a company, whether it's your own or somewhere else. And ultimately you want to sell a product or service. Right. And they also know that everybody thinks they have a unique, unique approach and that everybody thinks they're the best at everything. And right, but you don't need to go and then heavy-handedly, you know, add in like, and here's what we do and here's what we do. And here's what our product did. It's like, no, you can, you can talk about and educate. And what I, my, again, my experience was it led to then those conversations where somebody would say, like, I don't even know what you guys do. What do you do? I said, well, let me tell you, not up on stage. This is in the hallway afterwards. And it led to organic conversation. We build the products that do these things. This is why I'm talking on this, this topic. But, and then let's have a conversation. What are you experiencing here? You resonated with the topic. Here's our solution. Let's have a conversation. I think it's the same, same thing companies and people who've been, I don't want to say influencers, but MVPs and other, other things like that. There's a point where you start believing your own hype, where you're shifting it to MVPs, where the, around year three or four, the imposter syndrome can turn into arrogance, where you get a lot of affirmation, where you go to events and you, people come up and say, I've been, I've been listening to your podcast for years, Christian. It's awesome. I feel like, you know, you're, I'm the only person who does this in my company.  And that's where, that's where you can jump the shark really easily. Yeah. Well, I don't know if you've seen, Joel, like the stickers that I did. Well, that's why I created exactly that line was these, these stickers. You mean these stickers? Oh, that's right. Oh, that's right. I sent you one. Yeah. And that's great. And it's, it's kind of like, that's where, you know, and I don't want to talk poorly, badly about people in the, in the MVP, MVP group. But you think that people feel entitled to have a free license for everything. And, you know, really, when it comes down to it, we're unpaid PR people, you know? And we try and be authentic and try and say what we think. But, you know, we're there at Microsoft's Goodwill. And, you know, within our worlds, we may be, you know, we may be minor celebrities, but outside of that, you know, you're not. So having that perspective, but I think that translates to company as well.  They got some really smart people. And some of those people know certain things I don't. And we have people that know things they don't. And it's a big enough market for everybody to succeed. Yeah.  Like the in-person MVP summit, it's really going to be tough to do it again, you know, virtual and not be able to have those interactions. But we'll get back there someday. But yeah, there are some great people and whether you're an MVP or not, just to go and reach out to the vast majority are connector personality types. They are, you know, social people who are willing to and are openly like asking like, send me your questions, how can I help you? Did they just that kind of personality? And that's been, that's been great. So you get the occasional jerks within any community. It's going to happen, but yeah. I remember, and I don't know if 2012 this was happening in your part of the MVP program. Were you ever involved when, was that after, was that after Ballmer left or was that before Ballmer left? So that was, I think it was right around that time. I don't remember. First couple of MVP summits, they had an open mic with Steve Ballmer and people could line up and ask whatever question they want. And at that time, they had MVPs for consumer technologies like Microsoft Money had MVPs. And I remember vividly one of the MVPs almost breaking down in tears about Microsoft discontinuing Microsoft Money. And it was, it was sometimes there was, it was like a pitchforks and torches mentality at MVP because people would bring their list of problems or things that irked them and be very, very passionate about it. And that continued for quite a few years. In fact, I tell some newer MVPs that, like here's a great example. After the Yammer acquisition, to talk about Yammer in a room full of SharePoint people was a dangerous proposition at the MVP summit. But for those of us that were kind of sitting about in the back and I'm, look, I've been a Yammer advocate prior to the acquisition and there's been some problems but I'm a fan of the technology. But that was some good entertainment like Jerry Springer type entertainment at the MVP summit. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, but good times, good times. Well, so how else, so what are you out presenting on now? Kind of what are the topics that you're out doing events? I'm imagining you're doing a lot of online events now like all of us. So I haven't, well, I've had user group presentations and other things like that. I was supposed to be at Ignite the Tour in Chicago next week but that's not happening. I was supposed to be in India for Ignite the Tour, so. Really? Well, I was disappointed. I was looking forward to that, getting back there. So that last time I was there was. Yeah, I've been to Chicago before. I've never been to India though. Yeah, yeah, I've been there. But yeah, so other, what I'm doing, last year I had kind of an event heavy, at least for me. I did Ignite, I did user group summit, which is the big business applications. I did several other conferences like that, attended build. So, but beyond that, most of my contributions are through CRM Audio is my podcast network where we almost every week have at least one episode. And then I also, way back in 2013, George Dabinski, one of the Australian MVPs started this, a tip, a daily tip site modeled after that time there was an office kind of tip of the day. We kept that going unbelievably for what, eight years now. It were up to like 1400 tips. And so, those are some of the main things that I do. But as far as other things, I'm taking some of the events that we do around Power Platform and doing a virtual version of them. So there's the app in a day, we've done several of those. There's a bunch of other in a day type hands-on lab events that I find are great. I love those kind of content, those are great, yeah. But there's the Power Virtual Agents is the kind of newest member of the Power Platform family. And so there's a curricular in that. There's Power Automate in a day and customer insights in a day and some of the other ones. That's what I'm trying to get into because I think the app in a day is great, but, and they do update it, I know that people update it and they're regularly updating and bringing new technologies but there's so much more in the Power Platform beyond just Power Apps that giving people the option an easy way to do that. And it was kind of interesting, I was kind of nervous going in doing one of these remotely because they're very interactive. You have people, I'm stuck, how do I do that? Usually people miss a step in the hands-on lab. But what I did is kind of shook up the, what I found is people don't like to be on a Zoom meeting or a Teams meeting for eight hours. I think the virtual MVP somewhat taught us that. I don't know about you, but I was dead after each day. Right, well, because the other side of it too is that usually during the summit, I mean, you're going through, there might be five or six sessions in a day, but you're breaking that up with other conversations and meetings and there's events in the evening and it breaks it up slightly different, but the, or you might skip a content session and just be out in the hall in a deep conversation with fellow MVPs and Microsoft people and here just consuming it, not having some of those other interactions, but because the way that they split it up to serve North America and Amia and then APAC in the evening, I found that I was just doubling up on content, but made for some long days. Me too, and I thought the evening sessions, some of them were better because they had had a rehearsal. Yeah. It was like the first session, something would go wrong and then the second session they had it working. So anyway, next, I guess it's two weeks from now on the 21st, we're doing the virtual app in a day or virtual agents, which is the visual bot framework that works with Flow. So that's something. So that's easy to do. I just try and what I tell people, and I've been able to mentor 13 people to become MVPs now. And what I tell them is just try and do some kind of contribution every week and make it part of your schedule. So that might be writing a blog, that might be a podcast, that might be a YouTube video, you know, a number of different things. There's so many more things. I mean, when I started, it was basically forums and writing blogs. Now there's just so much other stuff to do. But I am seeing the whole COVID-19 thing and everybody worked from home. You know, I'm seeing like, it seems like podcasts and YouTube videos are getting a sizable decrease in some of their audiences because I don't know about you, but I don't, I generally don't listen to podcasts when I'm just working from home all the time. I've actually increased my podcast. Really? I'll sit there and we're working on something and I'll have, you know, on my phone over on the side. And sometimes you go with music going at the same time, but now I've found that it's, you know, and I'm walking a lot further with my dogs. Yeah, that's a good point. That's a good point. I should listen to them while I'm walking my dogs. Yeah, I'm doing that more than anything. So I'm doing five, six miles a day with the dogs and so I'm get through two or three podcasts in that time. So. Well Joel, I really appreciate the time today. People want to find out more about you, get in touch with you. What are the best ways to reach you? I do a lot of LinkedIn. I find that's probably the one I do the most. I'm also on Twitter. Either one of those is fine. Also, CRM.audio is the podcast if you want to subscribe and learn about all things power, platform, and dynamics. Very cool. Well, Joel, we'll really appreciate your time and have a great weekend. Stay safe, stay healthy out there. Yeah, thanks, Christian.


All right, I'm going to show you around the notifications here on Instagram the notifications your notifications when people like your post comment, etc. is the heart thing on the top right. So when you click on the heart thing on the top right. You see notifications and it's can be real overwhelming to scroll through all of these, you know. So what I find helpful let's click on the filter button on the top right so click on filter here. And then I can filter just by tabs. This is what I usually do I click on those two tags comments and sure follows if I want to but right now I'm so grateful that I have enough of an audience where I get a lot of followers from people that I don't know so I don't like to see those anymore so I just click tags and comments and and comment tags and I click apply. And now this is really the way I go through my notification on Instagram, I just look at these, and I usually usually they are. They don't have hearts yet. So I click on the hearts, once I've read them. Okay, and, and then you can of course reply you can either reply to that comment publicly reply, or you can privately message that person that's what the reply and message buttons mean. Sean anything else you want to say about how you work through notifications. I do the same thing I just filter by comments. Yeah, and will reply or rarely send anybody a direct message unless it's like sales related, like if someone is trying to sign up for a retreat and have a question, but oftentimes I would reply publicly because other people will need that information. So I rarely, I rarely use the message function but yeah this entirely I view my notifications to. Okay, very good very good thank you. So yeah if you have any questions about this you can comment below. I think Ruth asked, can we filter notifications like this on the computer if we're looking at Instagram via the laptop browser or whatever. Not not that I know of, but you know they they usually have more way more functions. Instagram was, you know really began and still continues as mostly a mobile app. So the computer version, the desktop laptop version is really just to for convenience for a few things so yeah. Hope this helps.


In this presentation, we will take a look at multiple choice questions related to property plant and equipment. First question. Property plant and equipment are A. Current assets B. Held to sell at profit C. Intangible D. Expensed at the time of purchase E. Used in business operations. We'll go through this again using the process of elimination. Property plant and equipment are A. Current assets. Property plant and equipment is not typically going to be current, it's going to be something that's going to be used over a year's time period and will be depreciated over the useful life. Therefore, not A. Doesn't look correct. B. Held to sell at profit. That's going to be an interesting one because note that the same type of property could be either property plant and equipment or inventory depending on whether it's being held in order to sell for profit. In other words, if we had like a forklift and we had it to use, it would be property plant and equipment. However, if we were planning on selling it at a profit, that'd be more like inventory. We bought it, we're buying and selling forklifts. So it wouldn't be held to sell for a profit. Intangible says C says intangible and it's not going to be intangible. Property plant and equipment will typically be something that will be tangible, meaning it has physical presence. We can touch it. We can feel it. We can hold it typically. It might be too heavy to hold, but it's tangible. We could touch it in any case. D says, D, Expensed at the time of purchase. And it's not going to be expense at the time of purchase because we're going to put it on the books as an asset at the time of purchase. So it looks like E must be the answer. E says used in business operations. And that is correct. So once again, property plants and equipment are E used in business operations. And note that's going to be a major difference if we were trying to problem solve this. We didn't know what the correct answer is between E and held for a profit, B. Those are two types of reasons we could be holding the property plants and equipment. And so we might be able to narrow it down between basically those two in some ways. You might be able to say, hmm, those are kind of like opposites of each other or related in some way, either it's held for profit or it's held to be used in the business. In other words, to be help us generate revenue for like a forklift by doing its work to do that. And so if we can narrow it down between those two, that might be useful in order to use the process of elimination. Next question. A change in an accounting estimate is A shown in past financial statements, B shown in future statements and past statements, C seen in current and future years financial statements, D not allowed, E allowed when laws change that affect the estimate. Let's go through this game. A change in accounting estimate. Now, first when we think about that, we're really kind of applying that to property plants and equipment, even though it might not say that in the question here because we know we're on property plants and equipment. That's the section we're reviewing. So the change in the estimate is probably going to be a change related to we're thinking a change in depreciation estimate. So we already made a depreciation estimate, we're going to change it at some point in the future. Or there could be a change, there's some new information that we think it would be better to have a change. So A says showing in past financial statements. Now, the question here when this happens is should we go back in time and change things in the past, which would be difficult because we would have to change the prior year's net income and then roll it over to the equity or retained earnings? Or do we make the change as of this point in time and go forward as best we can? Or do we not make a change at all and possibly just disclose it? And so showing that, no, typically, we're not going to go back to past financial statements. We're typically going to make the change at the point in time we think it should be updated going forward. B says showing in future financial statements and past financial statements. So if it were between A and B, B would probably be the more correct choice, right? If we were to narrow it down between those two, we would have to change the estimate in the past because if we change like the useful life, we would have to change it in the past and the future. So if it was between A and B, then you would think B would be more correct. And that's one way you can kind of narrow things down. But we're saying that that neither of those are correct because the financial we're not going to go typically to the past. C says seeing in current and future year's financial statements. And that's typically what we're going to do. We're going to put the change here this year as of the time we made the estimate and the change and in the future. And then D says it's not allowed and it typically will have it be allowed. I would think that'd be not allowed by law or something like that. And typically generally accepted accounting principles want to allow us to present the financial statements in as accurate of the way as possible. And so that's going to allow us typically to make the change here going forward. E says allowed when laws change that affect the estimate. So that would mean that maybe the new estimate that we had was based on some legal change and therefore that's what made the depreciation change. And that might be the reason for it, but that's not the reason that we need in order to report the change. So I think the answer, best answer, C, one more time. A change in accounting estimate is C, seen in current and future year's financial statements. Next question. An accelerated depreciation method is A, required for taxes. B, the method easiest to calculate. C, a method that results in larger depreciation expense in early years. D, a method that results in higher income in early years. And E, not allowed. So let's go through this again, process of elimination. An accelerated depreciation method is A, required by taxes. And the taxes often do use an accelerated method, but it's not required by them. We could use a straight line method, so that's not necessarily true. B, oftentimes depends on the tax code, but oftentimes we're able to use a straight line method or some type of accelerated. B, the method easiest to calculate, probably not. If we thought the method easiest to calculate, we'd be thinking straight line. Probably the first method that would come to mind. So C says a method that results in larger depreciation expense in early years. And that seems reasonable because it's an accelerated method. So we're gonna depreciate more in the beginning, we're gonna accelerate fast. And then D says a method that results in higher income in early years. Now if we didn't know the answer, we might say, those two sound kind of good. I'll keep that for now. And then E says, not allowed. And we know that if we've gone through this a few times, there's a few different types of estimates that can be used. And the accelerated method typically is one of them. So let's read through this again. An accelerated depreciation method is either C or DC. A method that results in larger depreciation expense in early years or D. A method that results in higher income in early years. Now if we have an accelerated method that depreciation is gonna be higher, which is gonna bring net income lower. So C looks right because it's gonna have the depreciation expense higher. D is wrong because it's going the wrong way. That net income would be affected, but it wouldn't be higher, it would be lower. So we're left with C then answer being an accelerated depreciation method is C. A method that results in a larger depreciation expense in the early years. Next question, cost of equipment less accumulated depreciation. A, historical cost. B, book value. C, market value. D, current value or E, replacement cost. So let's go through this again. Cost of equipment less accumulated depreciation, what is that? Is it the historical cost? Equipment minus, if we don't know that term, we might leave that for now. B says the book value and that seems pretty reasonable, the costs minus the accumulated depreciation book value. Leave that. C says market value. Now be careful on the market, whenever we talk about this property plant and equipment, we typically, every time we have market value, it's usually wrong to say market value. The other time it's on the books that the market value is when we bought it because that's, we bought it on the market and so we bought it at market price. But after the point of purchase, we're depreciating the cost and allocating the cost. We're not keeping market price. So C is not it. D says current value and that seems like another word for kind of the market value possibly, but that's not right. So that if we didn't know, that might be a way we can kind of eliminate these two because they seem pretty the same and we can't have both of them be correct. E says replacement cost. So it's not typically the replacement cost here that we're looking at. And again, that seems another method for us to try to find some kind of market value and that's not what we're doing here. We're trying to allocate the cost. So we're left with cost of equipment, less accumulated depreciation, either a historical cost or B, book value. Believe the correct answer is B, book value.


In our quest to understand just how ancient civilizations moved the heaviest stones on earth thousands of years ago, we fall short when it comes to answers. But only a few hundred years ago, the Russians seemed to have achieved the movement of a stone that was 300 pounds heavier than the unfinished Avalos. Wait to hear this. The Russian Thunderstone was a bold statement by Russia in 1770 as they asserted their dominance over the region, apparently only using sheer brute strength and gigantic wooden rollers to transport a stone weighing 1,500 tons before it was carved. Discovered four miles inland from the Gulf of Finland, the enormous stone is said to have been sliced from the mountain by a thunder strike and it is the largest and heaviest stone ever moved by man. Incredibly, during the stone's epic nine-month transportation to St. Petersburg and Russia, master stone cutters constantly shaped the stone as it was being moved, so from the start of the journey, till it arrived at the destination, the weight of the stone was shortened considerably. Catherine the Great, a German princess who married into the Romanov line, wished to connect herself to Peter the Great to gain legitimacy in the eyes of the people. She ordered therefore the construction of the bronze horsemen. It was her way of showing her admiration for her predecessor and her view of her own place in the line of great Russian rulers. The workers made very short progress on a daily basis because of the sheer size of the stone. Upon arrival at the sea, an enormous barge was constructed exclusively for the thunder stone. The vessel had to be supported on either side by two full-size warships. After a short voyage, the stone reached its destination in 1770 after nearly two years of work. A metal was issued to commemorate its arrival, with the legend close to daring. The stone's dimensions before being cut were 7 by 14 by 9 meters. Based on the density of granite, its weight was determined to be around 1500 tons. This is the most massive stone documented to have been moved by man. It took 12 years, 1770 to 1782, to create the bronze horsemen. The Tsar's face is the work of the young Mary Ann Cullet, then just 18 years old. She used his death mask as a model along with numerous portraits she found in St. Petersburg. On 18 August 1782, the finished statue was unveiled in a ceremony attended by thousands of onlookers. The statue itself is about 20 feet tall, while the pedestal it stands on is another 25 feet tall, giving a total of approximately 45 feet. According to a 19th century legend, enemy forces will never take St. Petersburg while the bronze horseman stands in the middle of the city. During the Second World War, the statue was not taken down, but was protected with sandbags and a wooden shelter. As a result, the monument survived the 900-day siege of Leningrad virtually untouched. Though the Thunderstone is on a smaller scale than the ancient monuments we see scattered across the globe. The technique used was very impressive across land and sea. We can't help but wonder if the gigantic stone really is the result of the foretold documentation, or is this vastly over-exaggerated in order to raise awareness of the sheer power of the Russian Empire to deter would-be invaders. The stone we see today in St. Petersburg is only 400 tons without the inclusion of the bronze statue. No massive and impressive, but whittled down by 1100 tons. That's a lot of waste rock that would have been carved and discarded. Why not just find a smaller rock? Do you know what we are getting at here guys? What do you guys think of this anyway? Comments below and as always, thank you for watching.