Transmission 21.1: SOMEONE BLEW UP THE BALLOONS I
Here come insights and behind the scenes from our futures practice! Travelers use these transmissions to know what we're up to, and potential travelers to know what to expect when time traveling.
This transmission is our first documented story of a failed innovation. Part 1 out of 2.
We are breaking this case into 2 transmissions, to be broadcasted as follows:
21.1 Thursday March 30th
21.2 Thursday April 13th
Heart sinking when our client had time to process their experience, and wrote:
“It felt a little like you had done most of the planning work for a party and then, before anyone could show up, the fire alarm got pulled and the building had to be evacuated and everything was just left behind.”
After three years working towards this public moment, it took us all a while to know how to react.
The BoostDAO (2022-2022) was the first Web3 experiment in Sweden to explore decentralized fund distribution in a public entity. It was a collaboration between the Innovation department of the city of Helsingborg, BoostHbg, and The Time Travel Agency.
Its launch signified a transition in how city funds had been distributed historically: from a centralized decision taken by a few, to a mechanism that provided agency in the process of funding films in Sweden.
City controllers canceled our party as we were setting up.
We take being wrong as a powerful learning experience, as it provides an opportunity to reassess our beliefs and perspectives, and to gain a deeper understanding of the world around us. Working inside the delicious innovation bubble for too long can make us forget. When we discover that we are wrong about something, it is a catalyst for growth and re-direction.
One lesson we reviewed the first days after the announcement was the importance to fight the temptation to defend our beliefs and opinions… “We have worked so hard”; “There are things you’re not seeing”; “This is the first time this is happening, so for that reason we should go on”. Instead, it became more productive (and soothing) to listen to each other and to seek out new information to explain to ourselves what had happened.
Does being wrong make us more effective learners and problem-solvers?
The BoostDAO was also a party to celebrate three years of building Web3 literacy as a 21st century skill in Sweden with BoostHbg (earlier iterations being The Eye and The Index and The Walking City).
Region Skåne in Sweden (where the city of Helsingborg is) exists so that everyone who lives in Skåne feels good and has faith in the future; and the city of Helsingborg has a special interest in building a smarter city with innovation.
Our blockchain collaboration answered their following challenge: “How can we make residents more involved and co-creative?”, nested under Democracy.
The DAO challenged our point-of-view about who decides how we fund public goods, and aimed to provoke the community’s curiosity about the methods and tools that could be used to test a change.
At the end of the 2022 process, BoostHbg was to assess the possibility to make history and turn one of their individual grants into a collaborative one using Web3. We would be the first team to ever do this in Sweden.
As we were setting the party up, ready to onboard pilot members, an abrupt change in direction from the management of the innovation funds determined we couldn’t run a project where real money was involved with distributed and decentralized decision making with the way that the legal framework for municipalities was currently phrased.
Nothing we can do with the current administration.
At the time of its cancelation, we did not believe this project had run its course, so we rerouted.
The Time Travel Agency and BoostHbg decided to make a map with our investigations, intentions, and vision, so that anyone could find the BoostDAO’s origins when/if the time was right, and threw the party of a lifetime!
Once more, we turned to creativity to save us from feelings of doom <3
A special feature we love about being wrong is the value of resilience and perseverance, hard-coded in our process yet easy to forget.
Making mistakes and experiencing failure is difficult, but it is important to remember that they are a natural part of the learning process. By embracing a growth mindset and viewing setbacks as opportunities for development, we can activate resilience and perseverance, which can help us to overcome future challenges and still achieve our goals.
The map to the party that was cancelled is an object you will discover in the next transmission; it is a product that documents the story of our failed innovation– the saga of BoostDAO.
It is a party invitation as much as a map to get to its current state, where it is waiting.
“This object contains the development of our project, emphasizing its most relevant elements and the relationships between them. It provides a set of materials that can be used by people in the future to keep working on it. It rises awareness to the limits of the system you might be about to alter.”
On the next transmission: what’s inside?, and the parts in our process we revisited or kept after this experience.
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