Monday Diary: A Trip to the World Economic Forum
Julia Hobsbawm will go a long way to get good ideas and networking
17 Oct 2011, 10:36
Economic discussions at the WEF
I don’t know what I am attracted more by, premium ideas or the exchange of them with interesting people (aka ‘networking’) but either way I’d go a long way for them and last week I did: all the way to Abu Dhabi. The United Arab Emirates, keen to show itself as a global hub, has extended hospitality to each of the 800 of us who make up the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Councils, also known as its ‘brainstorming’ wing.
So we flew in from all corners of the world, all of us in what is loosely termed the C-Suite: executives, thinkers, academics, entrepreneurs, invited at the behest of the people who run the World Economic Forum, which is fast becoming the big ideas incubator of the world, moving from being only about Global Leaders and their sherpas in Davos each January to being a year-round series of conferences and exchanges dedicated to improving the state of the world.
The event was Swiss-run. So even though we were in the middle of the desert, where the midday heat was like being in the middle of a very hot oven, men in floor length white and the Arab Keffiyeh to keep their heads cool rang brass cowbells to mark the beginning and end of sessions. Much of the time is spent with our own Councils, some ten people, chewing over ideas, and getting to know each other. By the end, particularly those of us back for a second or third year, start the teasing and amiability which goes with trust. We laugh – and then we argue. Occasionally we fiddle and tweet and smile ruefully at each other. Inside the cool airconditioned pods we pondered our particular issues and the edict of the World Economic Forum’s incredibly charismatic and quietly revolutionary founder Klaus Schwab to create new ‘models’ for the future.
This is easier said than done, and not least because we are not policy makers but mainly thinkers, can-do-ers. Talking is not delivering. The cloud of global disaster hanging over everyone was not just financial, not just environmental, it was pretty gloomy everywhere.
The annual survey we all fill in ahead of the Global Agenda Council meeting asks us a series of doom-filled questions asking us to rank which looming catastrophe is more likely to happen first: water shortages or a new wave of global terrorism? Untreatable pandemics or internet corruption so great it wipes the computers clean? In fact we divide into 80 groups addressing issues as variable and generic as ‘India’ or ‘International Law’ to “Catastophic Risks” and my own Council, “Informed Societies”. There is not much room for optimism but this year we were tasked with embracing pragmatism.
Can people in a hand-picked Talking Shop deliver results? Yes, but the route will be circuitous not direct. Connections made and ideas formed will crystallise in unusual and unexpected ways, over time. Someone attending will sit in a decision-making government group somewhere, sometime, and use the knowledge and ideas gleaned in October 2011. An article will be written somewhere espousing a “mash-up” of ideas first heard in the hot Abu Dhabi confines of Yas Stadium.
Change happens less directly than we think. It evolves. The zeitgeist changes. This is why I support the ideas forum, in all its forms. As I write, the hashtag #OccupyWEF is running on Twitter. This is a misunderstanding. The Forum is moving fairly substantially away from just “Leaders” and more into “Thinkers”. Bankers were thin on the ground here, and the ones that were looked downcast and embarrassed. The zeitgeist is definitely not going their way. Talking to some of the people – the woman who runs a health logistics charity in Africa where the main issue is to stop people who have no real history of using cars breaking the ones they are given to transport people and medicine around remote areas, to the Chinese professor of business ethics, or the Indian who left GE to set up his own global energy firm but freely admits one of the biggest obstacles is good old fashioned corruption, new models may be just about fixing the old ones first.
In the end we reached a consensus in our Council, and one which we will build on using technology to conference call and email revisions to each other for what will be a model for a global ‘informed citizenry”. We debated and talked and boiled this down to classify some five key components as being essential to a world in which information, from media but also threaded into education and government, should not be something defined only by who controls it, or twists it, or withholds it, but who can engage and access it, and make free and informed choice. The group included a journalism professor from Hong Kong; two silicon valley geniuses; two of Africa’s leading media group directors; Canada’s cleverest intellectual agent provocateur; Colombia’s biggest and most charismatic literary and media campaigner; two key Arab broadcast network chiefs; plenty of plural perspectives, brainpower and the will to come up with answers not just questions.
Coming home on the plane I’m afraid my networking drive did not sleep. I was travelling with really clever thinkers such as the leadership gurus Lynda Gratton of London Business School and Nick Udall of “The Nowhere Group” and Nick O’Donohoe, the ex-banker who now runs the Biog Society Capital fund for the Government here, and Stewart Wallis, now of the New Economics Foundation, formerly of Oxfam. People were transcribing business cards but also furiously writing down thoughts whilst they were still fresh. No-one I saw was watching the movies much.
“Money makes the world go round” sang Liza Minelli in Cabaret. But as The Economist wrote in their paper ahead of the World Economic Forum’s Annual summit earlier this year “more powerful than blood or money is the power of ideas”.
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