A Digital-First Mindset is Now Required

A Digital-First Mindset is Now Required

May 28, 2020 | 4 min read, Future of Work & AI

Organizations Must Adapt to the Need for Remote Decision-Making and Holding Annual General Meetings During and After the COVID-19 Crisis
The Annual General Meeting (AGM) season is fast-approaching and with the outbreak of the Coronavirus (COVID-19), it has left many companies wondering how to approach their upcoming AGMs and asking questions like:
How do we make this 100% virtual and safe for our shareholders?
How do we meet our legal obligation to ensure we’re compliant of bylaws?
How can we make this digital transition as painless as possible and ensure we can trust the platform that we choose?
How do we make this 100% inclusive and accessible if it’s online?
How do we do this quickly and without a large investment?

Leadership is now required to change their approach to the digital frontier, and now more than ever people need the right tools, platforms, and safe environments to make high-quality collective decisions about many things that remain uncertain.

Due to the growing travel concerns and social distancing requirements in place for most of the globe, physical in-person meetings for AGMs cannot happen. Regulating authorities have issued guidelines and measures to deal with the COVID-19 crisis and now companies must seek the right technologies to address these concerns.

THE ANSWER:  DIGITAL ANNUAL GENERAL MEETINGS (AGMs)

Swae’s team has responded quickly to this need by creating a Digital Annual General Meetings (AGMs) product that provides a safe, secure, accurate, and transparent environment allowing every critical shareholder to attend.

The major advantages of holding a virtual AGM:

  1. Every shareholder gets a voice in a safe and secure environment
  2. Companies can say goodbye to paper
  3. The transparent nature of the digital AGM allows for a more inclusive meeting and more stakeholders to have a voice
  4. Allows for an online voting system with data received in real-time
  5. During a time of any crisis, all persons involved can participate from the safety of their own homes
COMING YOUR WAY MAY 2020

Launching Swae for Digital Annual General Meetings

Thankfully, virtual meetings have been increasing in popularity and growing numbers of companies and organizations have adopted this online-only or online-hybrid method of communicating with their stakeholders or shareholders.

In recent years, high-profile companies such as Comcast, Intel, Starbucks, Paypal, and Hewlett Packard having held virtual-only AGMs. Even Lululemon (NASDAQ: LULU), a Delaware company based in Vancouver, conducted its AGM completely virtually, leading to local media coverage and a debate over the use of virtual AGMs.

Given the time we live in, we expect to see similar acceptance of the online forum among most Canadian companies and organizations.

Making the switch after years of traditional annual meetings doesn’t need to be stress-inducing, but involves a change of mindset, adoption of new technologies and processes.

Making the switch with Swae’s new digital AGM product can make it easier than one would imagine.

BE THE FIRST TO BE NOTIFIED WHEN SWAE’S DIGITAL AGM PRODUCT IS AVAILABLE! 
(AVAILABLE MAY 2020)

GET ON THE LIST
Our Response to Covid-19: Announcing Swae Public

Our Response to Covid-19: Announcing Swae Public

Apr 1, 2020 | 5 min read, Latest Swae News, Swae

Helping Teams, Organizations, and Governments Adapt to Digital Decision-Making

TLDR: Swae is launching a publicly accessible version of Swae to empower Teams, Organizations, and Governments to rapidly adapt to digital and remote decision-making during and after the coronavirus crisis

If there was ever a time for Swae, it’s now.

The Covid-19 Crisis is a watershed moment for reorganizing society to embrace a remote and digital-first reality. While most institutions have been unprepared to work and make decisions remotely, adapting decision-making process to embrace this remote reality is vital to the world’s progress at government and organizational levels. Almost every decision is one we’ve never faced before, and the need for inclusion, transparency, competition for the best solutions, and quality data and arguments has never been more important.

To help teams, companies, and governments adapt accordingly, over the next 4 weeks Swae will be launching a public open version of the platform that allows any organization or local government that is finding the ability to make collective decisions during this time quite difficult, to sign up and launch their own Swae environments.

Swae’s platform works a lot like Slack, which most teams and companies are already comfortable with, and enables them to make collective decisions over the internet quickly, conveniently, and safely.

Use cases include 1) digital annual general meetings, 2) remote team decision-making, and, 3) digital policy making and governance, and many more.

Background

As the situation with Coronavirus (Covid-19) unfolds daily, we incrementally accept that this pandemic isn’t going away anytime soon and will have very long term consequences. While experts ponder the full extent of the implications, one thing is for certain: Covid-19 has created a watershed moment for remote work and digital alternatives to physical meetings.

From team coordination, alignment, consensus building, strategic formation, governance and policy-making, our physical decision-making processes need to adapt to a world where much more must happen online. Remote work, remote collaboration, and remote and digital decision-making is here to stay and we must adapt our teams, companies, and governments accordingly.

Earlier in March 2020, British Columbia’s Premier, The Honorable John Horgan, discussed how badly they needed digital alternatives to a physical parliament convening, so that the policy makers could exchange a healthy debate about possible legislation the government was considering to enact into law. I imagine this is the case all around the world, where every government needs to ratify certain decisions into legislation and requires the benefits of healthy deliberation to identify and address any inherent biases or unintended consequences to make the best possible programs, policies, and solutions under the circumstances.

There are many actions that require digital alternatives that can work just as well as an in-person reality which includes;

  1. team alignment, collaboration, brainstorming, and decision-making,
  2. citizen inclusion in the policy design process,
  3. stakeholder inclusion in data gathering and solution formation for executive policy and strategy decisions, 
  4. digitizing annual general meetings.

Now more than ever, people need the right tools, platforms, and safe environments to make high quality collective decisions about a lot of things that remain uncertain.

Now more than ever, people need the right tools, platforms, and safe environments to make high quality collective decisions about a lot of things that remain uncertain. We are having to make decisions around topics that we’ve never had to face previously. Decisions such as possible changes to mortgage laws, employment insurance, rental vacations, policies at work around compensation, benefits and entitlements for small businesses, public policy about self-isolation, the border, etc.

The need for inclusion, transparency, a competition for the best solutions that includes high quality data, input, and arguments/perspectives has never been more important to ease the tensions and move forward with legitimacy.

The need for inclusion, transparency, a competition for the best solutions that includes high quality data, input, and arguments/perspectives has never been more important to ease the tensions and move forward with legitimacy.

 

Swae for the Public

 

Until now, Swae has been serving enterprise clients and government entities with its business-to-business platform. Swae has, for example, handled organizations such as Etihad Airways, Bosch, Doctors without Borders, amongst others with over 25,000 employees and over 15,000 active users. While we’ve experienced great results since launching our MVP product 16 months ago, the platform required a lot of customization and further integrations to make it work well for each organization.

Given the times we face and the need for remote inclusion, over the next 4 weeks Swae will launch a platform open to the public, that will allow any organization or local government to sign up and launch their own Swae environment (that is similar to using a Slack environment) to help teams, companies, and governments adapt accordingly.

Leveraging all our learnings and feature improvements to date, users will initially walk through a light configuration and integration process, and then begin inviting other users into Swae to begin ideating, and creating competing solutions to various challenges and inviting competing proposals from stakeholders to make high-quality and legitimate collective decisions over the internet.

With a few clicks and an easy onboarding process, remote teams, NGOs, small businesses, companies, and governments will be able to make inclusive, transparent, AI-supported, and merit-based decisions collectively during this crisis.

Use Cases & Pricing

Use cases for this public version of Swae can include:

Digital Policy Making — convening governments remotely to deliberate over legislation,

Digital Annual General Meetings (AGMs) — to digitally host your upcoming annual general meeting

Remote Team Decision-Making — teams can crowdsource a variety of solutions to a common challenge for survival strategy or compensation policies during any crisis.

Swae will offer flexible or, in some cases, free pricing in order to make sure that cost is no barrier to helping people use the most robust digital and remote platform for decision-making during this time.

Next week we’ll release more details of the features and a timeline on how we’ll be opening up Swae to the public to help all types of organizations, local governments, and communities leverage our technology to make the collective ideation and decision-making process much more technologically savvy, remote, safe, and convenient.

This is the moment that we all can come together to hear all of the relevant solutions and alternatives that matter, and use a fact and merit-based process for deciding the important decisions that we need to make. Our response matters. Please stay tuned as we release more.

Swae CEO speaks at Nesta London | Tata Spark Salon

Swae CEO speaks at Nesta London | Tata Spark Salon

Jul 9, 2019 | 5 min read, Events, Latest Swae News, Swae

What positive change can digital technologies have on the democratic process?


Swae’s CE Soushiant spoke at at Nesta London at the Tata Spark Salon on the opportunities and challenges for spreading digital democracy, and how Swae can bridge that gap.

Swae, The Future of Organizations, Decision-Making, and Governance

Swae, The Future of Organizations, Decision-Making, and Governance

May 7, 2019 | 8 min read, Announcements, Swae

The Problem

For the past ~3 years, I’ve grown evermore frustrated by the lack of voice or meaningful influence normal people seem to have in the big decisions institutions and organizations make that significantly impact our lives. Simply voting for candidates or filling out engagement surveys at work feels inconsequential, futile, and, well, insulting. These ‘participation’ options don’t seem to influence the dull, unoriginal, and incomplete solutions most leaders tend to develop in response to the uniquely complex business and social challenges of today’s world. They don’t help prevent abuse of power or keep leaders accountable to their promises. Instead, they provide us a false sense of agency. As consumers, we have so much influence over our life choices, but as employees or citizens, we have so little say in much more important decisions. So, why are these our only participation options?

Our modern day decision-making model is broken.

The root of this problem boils down to our organizational paradigm — how we make decisions and organize ourselves in society. Our modern day decision-making model is broken. It’s outdated, too centralized, too efficiency-obsessed (think factories and conveyor belts of the 19th century industrial era, when this decision-making model reigned supreme), too exclusionary; over-relying on hierarchies, representation, and delegated authority, andconfining stakeholders to strict parameters for participation based on status or function, when we live in a world where ideas, expertise, and genius are distributed and directly accessible through technologies and protocols.

As we move from crisis-to-crisis in our political systems — see first-hand the limitations of many democratic institutions to govern effectively and anticipate challenges — or witness the uninspiring, unethical, and poor decisions made by leaders in large incumbent companies about how best to navigate complexity, we see how unfit our decision-making model is in today’s world.

 

What We Believe

About 2 years ago, I began exploring alternative decision-making models from today’s status-quo, to see how we can “upgrade” decision-making in organizations (both companies and democratic institutions)— consequently upgrading governance. I attended Singularity University’s Global Solutions Program to learn more about the problem and build a solution.

During my research, first-hand customer discovery and experience at SU, I became convinced that we’re in the middle of an irreversible social and cultural transformation, accelerated by new technologies and unreasonable entrepreneurs. We are transitioning from one strong set of operating assumptions about how to manage society, to a new, upgraded set. The transition we are undergoing will redefine how we organize institutions, how we create new companies, who has a voice, what’s an acceptable social-contract. But the path is murky.

Source: Frank Diana, Tata Consultancy Services

The combination of increased computing power, the rise of blockchain technology, demographic and cultural changes has made the idea of designing alternative organizational decision-making structures and governance models that are different from today’s status quo — models that are more participatory, more intelligent, less corruptible, less costly — a real possibility.

These are still the early days but the trajectory is clear.

What We’re Building

Inspired by the pace of change, last year, I started a company to re-image organizational decision-making and build the operating system for future organizations. Our first product is Swae, an intelligent decision-making platform combining anonymity, artificial intelligence, and collective intelligence, to help organizations unleash the creativity of their stakeholders and make better quality decisions. Using Swae, individuals within organizations create great proposals anonymously with support of AI, then improve the quality of those proposals with crowd input. Proposals are debated on their merits, collectively evolved, and voted on. The proposals that receive the highest engagement (positive or negative) automatically percolate upwards to a decision (by management or the collective).

By providing the right mix of technology and process, Swae helps organizations efficiently tap into the wisdom of their stakeholders without reinventing the entire organizational structure. Swae’s process circumvents the blockages associated with traditional hierarchical organizational structures (cognitive bias, disengagement, fear of lost status and internal politics suffocating the expression of new ideas, etc.), to provide a more direct, transparent, and efficient pathway for ideas to go from the bottom to access management support. This helps decision-makers gather a greater level of truthful input, arguments, and data points to improve products, services, strategy and business models, without creating a tremendous burden of added work for management.

Swae intends to upgrade decision-making first in companies, then communities, then cities.

Etihad Airways Partners with Swae for Innovation

Etihad Airways Partners with Swae for Innovation

May 7, 2019 | 2 min read, Announcements, Innovation, Latest Swae News

Announcement

We’re excited to announce our first flagship partnership and upcoming proof-of-concept with Etihad Aviation Group. Together, we plan to deploy Swae’s platform company-wide to help improve the inclusivity and quality of bottom-up ideas generated and the employee-led innovation process. Through the proof of concept, Etihad aims to leverage Swae’s platform, our methodology, and AI tools to help take employee ideas to the next level, to influence the broader strategic direction of the organization.

Backstory

This partnership has been a work-in-progress for several months now. Our teams first met while participating in NYU Abu Dhabi’s StartAD Venture Launchpad program in April 2018. Thanks to NYUAD’s stewardship, they brokered a handful of such opportunities to allow start-ups like us to explore different applications of our platform within operations of established companies.

Deployment and Potential Impact

Etihad Airways is undergoing a subtle, yet very exciting transformation. Having welcomed a new CEO, they are preparing to become more organizationally nimble, adept, customer-centric, and more technologically driven in order to insulate against the general challenging trends facing the global airline industry. Moments like this offer unique opportunities to introduce new ideas, processes, policies and infrastructure to help sustain a shift in the orientation and trajectory of the organization for long-term competitiveness, prosperity and future-compatibility. Our partnership comes at a pivotal time, one in which we’re excited to explore the different ways in which Swae can support Etihad Aviation Group’s growth and adaptation.

Though specific details about the proof of concept are still being finalised (and cannot yet disclosed), kick off is expected in early 2019. We wanted to share this news with our community and supporters, as you watch us grow and test Swae’s platform, technology and operational capabilities while deploying in an organization of 15,000+ people. For us, the volume and diversity of ideas and decisions generated by the pilot will help us improve our systems and processes, calibrate our tools, and have real world learning to apply to more public facing experiments and applications.

Next Steps

2019 is already shaping up to be a great year, with a few other pilots expected to deploy early in the year. One we are in discussions with is a Smart City looking to deploy Swae’s platform for a large participatory budgeting / citizen policy creation experiment. Watch this space as we share more news about this pilot and the other experiments in our pipeline soon.

Swae featured in the Guardian UK Newspaper

Swae featured in the Guardian UK Newspaper

Aug 23, 2018 | 2 min read, Latest Swae News, Swae

The $1.8m prize aiming to tackle global threats to humanity – winners revealed

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The Global Challenges Foundation’s New Shape Prize, which seeks ideas to tackle global threats through cooperation, received more than 2,700 submissions from 122 countries. But what are the aims of the award – and the inspiration behind it?

Climate change, politically motivated violence and extreme poverty are some of humankind’s most pressing challenges – but what are the best ways to deal with these 21st-century problems? And what sort of institutions can people around the world trust to tackle them effectively?

On 29 May 2018, the New Shape Prize awarded a total of $1.8m in prize money to three entries* who proposed new forms of global governance to address those challenges.

The organisation behind the prize, the Global Challenges Foundation (GCF), was set up in 2012 by Swedish financial analyst and author Laszlo Szombatfalvy to explore new ways to tackle the most serious threats facing humanity.

The vice-chair of the Global Challenges Foundation, Mats Andersson, says: “We don’t have the toolbox today to deal with global risks. The only tool we have is the United Nations. The UN was founded 70 years ago to deal with the challenges we had at that time. Now we need something better and more powerful.”

Another GCF board members is renowned environmental scientist Johan Rockström of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, he says: “We have entered a fully globalised stage of human development, at a special juncture where our social, political, economic and environmental pressures are right at the ceiling of what the social and biophysical world can cope with.” Rockström, who is also professor of environmental science at Stockholm University and an international researcher on global sustainability issues, adds: “Are we, as a humanity, able to destabilise the whole planet?”

In 2016, in an effort to catalyse new thinking around the collective management of global catastrophic risks, the foundation launched the New Shape Prize competition. It aims to reshape the future of global governance, by inspiring ideas around different forms of cooperation.

“Prizes have a historic track record in spurring on innovation,” says the foundation’s executive director Carin Ism. And the economic incentive is only a part of it. “[Prizes] have tended to create community around an issue, increasing the talent pool but also [connecting] individuals thinking about the same topic who had not known about each other.”

The Global Challenges Foundation wants to act as a convener for the best thinking, in order to uncover advances in contemporary global governance. “We want to see who is also thinking about decision-making and the way we make and enforce those decisions,” she continues.

From 2016-17, GCF invited submissions proposing new forms of global cooperation. In total, the competition received more than 2,700 submissions from 122 countries. They were assessed by 10 regional review panels, each including experts from civil society, politics, academia and international organisations.

The overall criterion for the competition was to design governance models capable of tackling these global challenges, rather than trying to solve individual problems. The proposals should also be acceptable to the international community, with the potential to be implemented in the near future.

For Rockström, the implementation issue was particularly challenging. “We felt that it was necessary to avoid blue-sky type utopian ideas. You could think about many ideas that are intellectually appealing – for instance, let’s abolish nation states – but we had to be pragmatic and have something that can stand a chance of implementation in the real world.”

The 14 shortlisted entries represented cutting-edge thinking on global governance and were proposed by some visionary and innovative thinkers with backgrounds in social science, ethics and law.

Many of the entries built on work already done by the UN or other global institutions such as the World Bank. Some looked at ways to tackle the most important issues for local communities and involve them in the process. Others explored better means by which citizens can participate more fully in democracy; and others sought new ways to tackle poverty.

The projects often incorporated emerging technologies, such as blockchain and AI that could enable communities to have direct and secure access to decentralised forms of governance.

These projects were presented at the New Shape Forum, which took place in Stockholm, Sweden, from 27-29 May. Some of the world’s most significant thinkers in the sphere of global governance took part in this forum, with Michael Møller, director-general of the UN office in Geneva, giving a keynote speech.

The general public was invited on the first day to voice ideas on how global cooperation could be improved, and how threats to humanity could be tackled more effectively. That same day, finalists presented their proposals for feedback and input from the public. These proposals were presented to the final jury, consisting of representatives from all over the world, with the shortlisted candidates honoured in an awards ceremony.

The forum is, however, just the start of the process to find a New Shape for global governance. The Global Challenges Foundation will convene working groups to refine some of the New Shape ideas; and its Educator’s Challenge is asking teachers and lecturers – of all disciplines – to create knowledge about global governance and positive ways in which it can be reformed.

“We all want a safe tomorrow,” says Ism. “We cannot ensure this unless we tackle the root cause of our global challenges: the limits of current frameworks for global cooperation.”

On Tuesday 29 May 2018, the New Shape Prize awarded a total of $1.8m in prize money to three entries: Global governance and the emergence of global institutions for the 21st century, by Augusto Lopez-Claros, Arthur Lyon Dahl and Maja PCE Groff; A truly global partnership – helping the UN do itself out of a job, by Natalie Samarasinghe, and AI-supported global governance through bottom-up deliberation, by Soushiant Zanganehpour. The Global Challenges Foundation remains committed to supporting the reworking and refinement of the best ideas toward more holistic models that emerge from this process.

The regional panel of judges (pictured main) were: (L-R) Fredrik Karlsson, head of projects, GCF; Maina Kiai, chair eastern/southern Africa; Folke Tersman, board member, GCF; Emil Andersson, project coordinator, GCF; Darynell Rodríguez Torres, chairperson Latin America; Penda Mbow, chair western Africa; Jens Orback, chair western Europe; Azita Raji, chair North America; Ulad Vialichka, chair eastern Europe; Lan Xue, chair east Asia; Magnus Jiborn, consultant, GCF; Hajer Sharief, chair North Africa/Middle East.

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