What do we really want? We really want evolution to continue! We have to take care of the future. We have to take care of our children. And for that there will have to be an evolution of human consciousness.

HELMUT VOLKMANN
SENIOR DIRECTOR
APPLICATION RESEARCH CENTER INFORMATION SIEMENS AG

INFORMATION MARKETS FOR SOLVING WORLD PROBLEMS

In 1986, at age 50 and having been with the company for 32 years, Helmut Volkmann was asked by the management at Siemens' massive R&D center in Munich to decide whether he wanted to pay closer attention to the software development group he headed or spend three years pursuing his philosophical interests, essentially as resident thinker. He chose the latter.

Helmut's approach to this opportunity was unique, to say the least. Rather than doing topical research or interviewing a group of experts, he chose focus on the emerging challenges of the Information Age by creating what he termed a virtual team - an imaginary group of persons who live in the future but who are able to visit the present. Each member of the team had a name and distinctive personal attributes.

Helmut described them to me in his book-lined office:"Tom Sawyer was a member. As a young boy I liked Tom Sayer very much because he was an action-oriented hero, or would like to be a hero. The second team member was Kai-Out-Of-The-Box, a Berlin street gang boy. The third one was Medic-a-Twin. He doesn't exist in literature - I invented him. The twin means there are to souls in his body: being a scientist and being a reformer.

"The fourth member of the team was a naive person like Parsifal. I called him Phipps-the-Little - a child putting questions they always wonder about to the older people. The fifth member was a woman. I called her Eve Pragma, a very beautiful woman. And the sixth person was Ingo, the engineer."

Then Helmut invented an entrepreneur who had attended an exposition in Hannover, learned about the team, and contacted them and said:"You are from the future. I would like to make my company the best for society. Let me know more about the future." A long series of adventures ensues, complete with in-depths dialogues, all products of the creativity Helmut has displayed throughout his career.

In one adventure the entrepreneur decides to build information machines that are good for society but good for his business as well. To do so, he engages the team to collect and organize all the knowledge in the world, a task they find impossible. There is all kinds of information available, but it is impractical and does not really inform. After repeated efforts, they go back to the Big Bang and begin to discern the basic principles of reality: wholeness, the interconnectedness of all things, and the dynamic of evolution among others.

The entrepreneur is impressed but needs more. He wants the team to discover how the human mind works. They find, of course, that science does not have the answer. The team, however, has generated a great deal of information in the process and decides to set up an information market and share what they know with the entrepreneur and his friends in business, politics, and science.

Each person on the team presents a topic. Eve Pragma, for example, presents the concept of an information balance. On one side of the balance is everything you know about an organization or an institution in life, including its strengths. On the other side are the problems of the institution and your expectations and intentions for it. The balance is dynamic. It requires work to fulfill expectations and to solve problems. This illustration presented the message of the information market: There really are large problems in society, but there is information to solve them if we have the will to do so.

As an offshoot of this process, a slogan emerged: The Information Society is more than Industrial Society plus Information Technology. As Helmut says, "We have to look for this more than." The "more than" refers to social, learning, eductional, and transforming dimensions - abstract qualities that transcend the hardware and software of rational information technology.

Finally, the followers of the entrepreneur discover the process of Visioning, asking, "What do we really want?" and "What can we dare to do?" These are imperative questions in our emerging times, Helmut says, "because most of the ideas people have are rebutted by why they cannot work. We are champions in creativity when it comes to determining why a thing cannot work."

In answer to the first question, "What do we really want?" Helmut proposes:"We really want evolution to continue! We have to take care of the future. We have to take care of our children. And for that there will have to be an evolution of human consciousness."

From the dialogue between the virtual team members and the entrepreneur and his followers, Helmut also generated the SATORI method for systems enhancement. The first letters of six key words - Start, Analysis, Transcendence, Occasions or Opportunities, Results, and Innovations - form the acronym SATORI, which in japanese means enlightenment. The method involves the establishment of open centers for information and problem-solving regarding such global concerns as property, energy, resources, and enviromental degradation.

The idea for these centers originated in 1973 when Helmut was responsible for organizing and conducting an information meeting for 1,000 key Siemens managers in Munich. Eshewing the traditional approach of having a series of speeches delivered to a passive audience, Helmut secured the Olympic Stadium for a participative event. With 20 to 30 seperate spaces on each of tow levels, he and his team set up information markets, each focused on a particular topic, where managers could come together and discuss relevant issues they were interested in. As a result of the success of this approach, Siemens now holds information markets for its senior managers every few years.

Helmut believes that global-issue information markets are both possible and neccessary if the world is to survive. The idea of the market, Helmut says, is to make information about the problems and the problem-solving activities as visible and immediate as possible so they are taken seriously and dealt with. In fact, Helmut is convinced that the problems we see today will be the business of tomorrow...the problem-solving business.

Focusing on enviroment, Helmut suggests a daring idea: that producers would have to come up with two prices for each product. The first would be the market price; the second would be the ecological price, that is, the full cost of its lifetime enviromental effects. "The hypothesis is if people see the distance between two prices, and I guess the ecological price will be higher than the market price, they will make over decisions. If they learn one product may be cheap, but has a high ecological price, they will say, "No, I will pay abit more for another product where the ecological price is lower."

"In the ecological price you would have to deal with all the problems of the enviroment, but also with world distribution; the problem of making the poor poorer in the third world by providing employment there that looks good, but forces children to work and then only for pennies.

"You would need laws about this. And if a business did not tell the truth about the ecological price, they would lose customer confidence and in the long run be forced out of the market. You would get self-regulation by having a two-price system."

Siemens' enviromental consciousness, Helmut reports, is usually advanced. His proposal that one focus of the 1990 information market be on technological assessment was quickly accepted by management. The president announced that Siemens would be the number one company in Germany in solving enviromental problems, through recycling and so forth. Reportedly the president said: "We will not wait until the governement makes stronger laws. We will begin now in this moment." Helmut reflected at his point, "I guess if we dared more to be nearer the truth, and tried to find out the truth by intersubjective assessment and more communications and cooperation, we could change the world."

At the end of 1988, Helmut was asked to arrange a workshop for Siemens' scientific research people. As a result of the workshop, he became a moderator/facilitator, disseminating information ragarding strategy for technological development that occupied him until the summer of 1991. At the time of our interview he had just been named head of a new department in reorganisation of Siemens' research activities. There the concepts he has developed and dealt with over the past decade can be more directly applied to advancing the company's efforts in the future. In anticipation of an autumn workshop as part of his assignment he was preparimg a talk entitled, "Muses and Tales about the Information Society: Wishes of Today; Effects of Tomorrow."

Doctor Volkmann's vocational residence is Siemens AG, Zentralbereich Forschung und Technik, Otto-Hahn-Ring 6, D-81739 München, Germany.

James E. Liebig, World Business Academy, 1994