Joining Traffnetic — The Smart Traffic Network
Hi, my name is Greg Esau,
and I am using Medium as a platform to attract the 150-ish people that I believe are here, that are capable of forming Swarm Intelligence into a “Smart Swarm”, whose strategic purpose is the designing, developing, managing and governing of a network of commuters that can self organize to create highly efficient network flows of traffic. The network in turn learns how to exploit and fairly share the inherent value of a 2–3 billion strategically aligned professional social network with the people it serves.
This network is the gateway to economic liberty for people as we’ve never experienced it before.
This network is the gateway to mass customization that no hierarchical system can possibly achieve.
This network is the gateway to an economic system where we work for each other, as opposed to against one another.
This is a network where people and humanity can reach for its full potential in this emergent digital century.
This is a network that will ensure cities and their citizens have prime agency over their digital properties and digital right management, and our digital sovereignty.
This network is:
Traffnetic — The Smart Traffic Network
The Genesis Behind Traffnetic
Much of my life, starting when I was 19 years old, has been about learning to build things, and ever more complex things for specific customers.
Very early in my career, while balancing the market driven motivation to continuously enhance my skills and value proposition in the world of custom designed buildings, mostly concentrated in custom homes, I also was noticing opportunity in organization.
Growing up, my parents gave me plenty of opportunity to roam, learn and grow.
I had a twin brother with a shared mindset of curiosity and exploration, and with that, a genesis for a small tribe of like minded I accumulated throughout my school years of music lovers, athletics, politics, economics, and life itself.
This tribe was my learning community, even if I didn’t understand this is what we were at the time.
Anything I learned in school was incidental to the teacher.
I would later come to understand I was ADD, mildly bipolar, and my view of how the world worked and how to thrive in that environment was vastly different than most people I ever associated with.
My mind was inherently suited to seeing the world as ecosystems and the networks that powered them. And the more I explored the world of work and how I was going to maximise my value in that environment, the more I could see the ruling class was particularly inept at managing these systems, yet particularly adept at taking the lion’s share of the pie these systems produced in exchange for this mismanagement.
Through this ever growing realization, I became obsessed with learning how to design systems that could organize and manage ecosystems and talent networks, that would far outperform those that currently existed.
Custom building and construction management turned out to be an excellent environment for exploring and exploiting this obsession.
This obsession had been percolating throughout the 1980's and early ‘90’s, so by the time the WWW became more accessible through the Mosaic browser, I was thoroughly primed for the new digital environment that the properties of the internet would have to offer.
I got myself an internet appliance — then known as a computer with a modem — and from then on, my world would never be the same.
In this timeframe, from my humble beginnings in the 1980’s to 2020, I have plowed my time and the earnings accrued from my construction world of exploration and exploitation, into that of the digital networked world of learning how to design and develop ecosystem management systems.
For brevity’s sake, let’s just say this was a drunkard’s walk of epic proportions, covering a diversity of topics with a breadth and depth that no normal, sane person would dare to think of pursuing.
This, um, crazy epic journey has cost me to date approximately $500,000 of my own money, and tens of thousands of hours of my own time.
At this stage of my personal development, here in the summer of the 2020 Covid-19 Pandemic, I have a highly evolved knowledge around the science of complexity, and how we will use collective intelligence, platform economics, aligned commuters, design communities; and a network of people who understand the wild variety of expertise from which we can further learn, to seed and grow a strategic social network to manage traffic flows and to exploit of collective digital properties for the benefit of our cities, our citizens, and the businesses and governments that serve them.
Whether this all has enough gravitas to be of value to society is why I am taking this next step in order to find out.
Is there a market for a vastly superior transportation management system?
The proof, as they say, is in the pudding.
And this is where you all come in.
Okay.
You can take the Blue Pill and jump off now.
I applaud the maturity of your decision. This is not for the faint of heart and adventure.
Or you can take the Red Pill and continue down the rabbit hole to the world of Swarm Intelligence, and a new shared reality of the world around us.
What I put forth from here, is a “good enough minimum viable call to arms”.
Only we can improve it to be more appealing, more attractive, more coherent.
So here you have it. Your call. There is no right or wrong.
Traffnetic:
How A Tribe of 150-ish People from the West Coast Corridor of North America Are Going to Form a “Smart Swarm” As The Professional Organized Foundation That Designs, Develops, Manages and Governs a High Performance Traffic Management System for Commuters the World Over.
The First of a Thousand Steps
I am grateful for your continued time and attention. I respect both as the most valuable commodities we each have.
Therefore, every word I speak from here on out is intended for this very select tribe of people from the West Coast Traffic Corridor, extending from the northern cluster of Vancouver B.C., along the entire west coast spine to the southern cluster of San Diego.
Our Why, Our Purpose, Our Identity
Our future prosperity resides in our shared, collective ability to manage and govern ecosystems and their performance networks.
Power resides in networks, not hierarchies.
The world has worked this way since the rise of the Agrarian Age, the power over these systems and networks evolving in different guises and environments for close to eight thousand years (give or take), until a somewhat surprising invention of the means to propagate religious messages became the seeds of the most disruptive revolution in history — that of the industrial revolution and the economics of mass production and the freedom of movement and association of people and their ideas — The Printing Press. The greatest invention of the last 1,000 years, due to its ability to disseminate information through networks.
While the printing press was disrupting the status quo of the Catholic Church in the West, consequently, power evolved in order to continue to have a grip on the control of the networks that make up the economy that was now sprouting from the seeds of spreading knowledge.
The truism that has always existed is that power always flows through networks.
The industrial era gave financialism — itself a particular vision for controlling networks going back to Venice in the 13th Century — the rich soil in which to flourish and fully exploit the riches the capitalist economy proved in its ability to produce.
Financialism has always understood power resides in strategic networks.
We, on the other hand, do not.
Much of the world is trained to see itself as this institutional amalgamation of governments, corporations, organized labour, businesses and politics. A reduction of the exceedingly complex, into this caricature that is simpler to understand.
As individuals, we cannot understand complexity. It is impossible.
Therefore, we are very easily swayed in trying to exercise our power over our careers as professionals, by when we vote as citizens. And through spending our spending as consumers. We see institutions, power sees networks.
This simplistic view leaves us dangerously vulnerable.
This, as we all know here, is a rather ingenious version of the bait and switch.
The economy, as business and governance, in reality is an exceedingly complex web of ecosystems in a constant tango of competition and cooperation, the power over which flows through strategic networks. These networks in turn flow through the worlds of financial, corporations, businesses, government, the talent pool, and consumers — be they consumers of products, services, or ideology.
While ostensibly a free market economy, it is anything but. And this pernicious type of networked power is the Ultimate Innovator’s Dilemma.
The promise of the internet was to give people the ability to organize in a manner that would allow us to share the pie that we create through our dedicated efforts every single day.
The promise of the internet and the digital economy would be the realization that we are the economy, we are the most vital economic unit of measure.
Not corporations, not the financial instruments of “investment funds”, as the economic narrative would now have us believe.
The dark side of social networks, that evolved instead, is distraction and division. Social networks as they now operate easily allow the manipulation of opinion at the expense of knowledge and knowhow.
Social networks are now making us collectively stupider, angrier, threatened and insecure in mental and financial health.
This initial promise of the internet has turned into a daily exploration and exploitation of some of the worst of collective human behaviour possible — short of a world war.
And let’s not kid ourselves, that particular escalation of stupid is always a few clicks away.
Financialism creates wealth through a certain level of chaos.
This, it needs to be said, is not a branch of conspiracy theory, but rather a nuanced reading of financial markets and the never ending pressure to beat average. This is mainly accomplished now through algorithms and their ability to leverage price movements in a wide variety of ways.
It is a system that self generates cycles of chaotic movements that by happenstance itself knows how to exploit. No conspiracy theory needed here.
Every single member of our Smart Swarm Tribe understands this to some degree. Enough so to understand the world’s economic system and the global biosphere cannot withstand or survive this highly refined means of exploitation for much longer.
Something is going to give, and people the world over will pay the heaviest price.
We know in our heart and minds that something has to be DONE!
We ARE the Ones committed to doing something about it.
We are the people with that burning desire of our collective “why we exist” that will learn how to master the art and science of Strategic Ecosystem Orchestration and how to harness the full power that comes with the performance networks inherent in the ecosystems.
We need this purpose burning in our collective soul if we are going to manage to turn this ship around.
Okay, I am In. What Next?
The West Coast Traffnetic Project
As an aspiring Smart Tribe with Swarm Intelligence that populates the West Coast Traffic Corridor, we have a lot to learn.
Focus, from here on, is essential.
In very short, we need to learn together how to understand the problem of traffic, and what tools are available for its never ending improvement.
Our business is turning traffic congestion into traffic flow using a strategic network of commuters.
We do not lack the technology or knowhow for how to improve traffic.
What we lack is the right type of organizational model and system for improving it. This is a social behavioural problem, not necessarily a technology problem.
Our macro strategy is Ecosystem Orchestration. That is, we are the ultimate in Specialized Generalists.
A scalable digitally enhanced General Contractor/Design-Build Firm, with a stack of capabilities that can move this project from inception, through a two year development process that onboards a growing network of commuters; various branches of local, civic, and regional government officials; keystone businesses that are essential to the daily ability of moving people around; the top tier professional talent that resides in networks that correspond with the ecosystem that supports the movement of traffic; community leaders that advocate the community embedded design thinking process for traffic management; the top tier talent that can design and develop the platform and apps upon which this strategic network resides and flows; and the Influencers and Connectors that are essential to idea flows in every city.
This is a tall order.
I am also 100% confident everyone and everything we need for this project exists. We just need to use our nascent abilities to attract the necessary resources to our cause.
This said, the array of knowledge and abilities are daunting.
Consider this:
We need to design and develop everything from scratch. We can bring nothing from the world of hierarchies and industrial age business models.
For that matter, we have to excel at keeping the poisonous and cancerous mindsets of that source of power out of our tribes. We have to be extremely careful with the type of capital and resources we bring into this network.
We are building the world’s largest, most advanced strategic social network.
The stakes of which are the future of the world’s economy and the quality of human life.
We get the first two years of design and development right, we have an actual shot of pulling this off.
We get it wrong, and we do not have a hope in hell.
As such, we all start here fresh at the bottom of our respective S-curves.
We are all students, we are all teachers, we are all mentors.
We all seek mastery in what we do.
If you have read “Tribal Leadership”, we come into this project as wanting to stabilize a Stage Four culture, and moving towards Stage Five.
We should also be well versed with Ben Horowitz’s “What You Do Is Who You Are: How To Create Your Business Culture”.
Smart Swarms Begin With An Environment Conducive to Learning at Network Scale.
To say that Covid-19 has changed everything is of significance to practically everyone on the planet.
It certainly has affected how I had been planning to seed this tribe and our commuter network.
As designers, we know constraints are what gives projects focus and increased value.
As platform designers, we also know that the Chicken and the Egg problem is the most difficult hurdle to overcome.
This pandemic has helped me weed away a lot of different possibilities for seeding this network, and correspondingly the business model for how it makes money, delivers value.
Likewise, the responsibilities and requirements of my role also became a lot more clear as I worked through this weeding process.
As Lead Orchestrator, my main role is in the development of these capabilities for Ecosystem Orchestration within a highly trained, Navy Seal like tribe of extraordinary people that can learn how this model and system works (exploration) and how to maximise its potential to transform the way traffic is managed and experienced, governed and visualized through a strategically aligned network of commuters (exploitation), into what will be the guiding force for others to follow. Without SmartSwarms — aka Swarm Intelligence — we will struggle to scale this model.
For us to move this from the drawing board to actionable learning events, I am asking you to commit your valuable time to meeting every Saturday via Google Meet.
To further align our collective intelligence around this strategy, I also ask you to commit to learning the material, research and key memeplexes that underpin this strategy, and the network of people I fashioned around this strategy.
If you have committed to our nascent on-boarding process, it is highly likely you each will be familiar with much of the material, concepts, theories, empirical evidence, and people that will form the core of our foundation of knowledge.
You already know, that in order to truly create ground-breaking innovation, we have to tear things down to first principles, along with the inherent realities and opportunities that reside in Loonshots.
It is here that we truly find our footings, our cohesiveness, our strategic alignment, cohesiveness and capabilites, and our ability to “Extreme Team” at network scale. You will have read General Stanley McCrystal’s “Team of Teams”, and co author Chris Fussell’s follow-up book, “One Mission”.
It is through this deep learning process, and our shared foundations of experience, expertise and understanding that we form deep bonds and trust.
Teaming, as we all know, is critically dependent on trust, and trust is only achieved through vulnerabilities.
We have to be very comfortable being totally naked with the extent of what we know — and don’t know.
Exploration begins by finding out what we do not know, with exposing our biases and heuristics, by separating System 2 thinking from System 1 thinking, by separating what we think we know from what we need to understand, by keeping our ever present egos from preventing our real personal growth and ability to lead in networks.
Knowing is copying. A necessary heuristic that can be gotten away with in most environments. Knowing is dangerous to adaptation.
Understanding is deeper. Philosophy, in the tradition of Daniel C. Dennett, is a means to understanding. (Dennett’s “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea” is also on our required list for study).
Understanding is the difference between Design and Happenstance. It is the difference between luck and strategy. Luck, as we will come to learn and understand, is far more a factor in success and failure than a lot of self-serving business “how to” industry is able or willing to admit.
We continuously need to remind ourselves what is at stake.
Traffnetic needs to achieve zero accidents, zero carbon footprint, zero delays, while providing daily customized value to transportation experiences across the entire socio-economic spectrum, and fully capturing the value of our digital properties that are created in the process.
Traffnetic needs to ensure that the health of our cities and citizens are our main measure of importance.
This is a monumental shift in the focus of economic thought, which through academia, policy, corporate and financial incentives, places Financial Institutions and their own ecosystem of corporations by virtue of the stock markets as the prima facie of the economy.
We can not settle for “better than most”. In the arena in which we will ply our trade, there is no second place.
We all know platforms are all or nothing propositions.
If we are going to form a strategic network of commuters that will transform traffic, we must be the best.
Our platform, our ecosystem, our business have to be the most trusted in the world.
Traffnetic and Trust must be synonymous for our customers, our partners — Period.
This is the “design criteria” I am responsible for holding us accountable towards.
Therefore this is the “design criteria” we are collectively responsible and accountable for.
Making The Commitment
If you have what it takes, and this opportunity suits where you are on your S-curve, then commit!
Regardless of the outcome, the process will advance your career, enhance your network and your value reputation within it.
Give Traffnetic two years, and your life will never be the same.
Imagine waking up every morning and going to a place where every single day we work and play together for understanding how we are going to fundamentally alter the way we ‘see’ the economy, and the unbelievable potential this has for the future of society, the future of our prosperity.
Email me at gregory.smartswarms@gmail.com, and ask for the Google Doc that will start to lay out the most relevant learning material to becoming a high value player in the Smart Swarms Tribe of the West Coast Traffic Corridor.
And then, let’s get to work. Time is wasting.
