Pique Principles
Pique is a platform for people and organisations who are working to make JHB the international benchmark for sustainable social, economic and technological practices.
I had just finished explaining my plans for Pique to a former colleague, after a short pause she said, “Redesign JHB? it’s a good thing you are starting small!” I laughed and held up my hands in surrender. At Pique, our aim is to drive some big change and we need clear guidelines to help us reach our goal or we’ll be sabotaged by our own good intentions.
“…we know when we climb up a big mountain the views get increasingly gorgeous as you get to the top, but the oxygen gets a little thinner. And so having a successful experience way up there at the top requires that you are able to invest a lot of oxygen — either bring extra oxygen with you on the mountain or invest a lot of time and energy to succeed up there” Social psychologist Eli Finkel, Hidden Brain Podcast: When Did Marriage Become So Hard?
Pro’s and con’s
A driver has lost control of a car and is speeding towards two people. You’re watching the event unfold and in a moment you realise that you could save one person from death — which one do you save? Thought experiments like this one aren’t designed to make you feel stupid, they are designed to see how you think, making you feel stupid is just a bonus.
If you don’t have a way of navigating tough problems they can bully you into indecision. You end up in the scenario loop, going round and round arguing with your team or just with yourself. You become paralysed by the fear of making a bad decision. You probably just want to avoid the problem and have someone else make the decision for you.
If we go back to our speeding car scenario you can save one person, die trying to save both or do nothing and let both die. Dramatic I know, but the point is even if you do nothing you are still making a choice.
Principles help us make choices by prioritising some outcomes over others. What if one of the people staring down the speeding car was someone we loved or a small child? They help us focus on the right problem and stop us trying to solve “all the problems.” The principles below will help us to decide what type of organisation we want Pique to become and what culture we hope to grow in JHB.
Pique Principles
#1 Connecting the dots
There are many people already working towards similar goals as us. We aim to create partnerships and spaces where exponential value can be created through collaboration and formal partnerships. We believe these interactions will accelerate the development of sustainable solutions to JHB’s biggest problems.
#2 Collective knowledge
Sharing information moves us forward, like the passing of relay baton from one runner to the next. Pique aims to facilitate the skills transfer and knowledge sharing from our societies most skilled practitioners to the most in need of learning and mentorship. From students at the beginning of their careers to young professionals looking to grow as well as those with no formal training.
#3 The human element
People are contrived, irrational, superstitious and generally silly, but our contradictions are what make us human. We aim to embed our services into people’s messy, chaotic, human lives.
#4 Remove, reduce, reuse
Powerful interconnected systems deliver information, products and services to JHB every day, but also create waste. We can evaluate the value of an industry when looking at the effect on the greater ecosystem of JHB. Pique aims to engage with the people who know the systems best to figure out how to make them more efficient, help us bake additional social and economic value into them.
#5 Perspective matters
Innovation requires collaboration between people with diverse skills, experiences, thought processes, values and talents. Pique will create opportunities for diversely skilled people to collaborate and propose sustainable solutions to common problems. We will facilitate the planning, creating, delivering, measuring and enhancement of these sustainable solutions.
#6 Compound value
Access to professional skills has the most potential to deliver high impact on the social and economic change in JHB. Skilled people are in demand, at Pique we believe that despite good intentions, time and opportunity are the biggest obstacles to participation in Social Investment. We aim to make it easier for people to donate the most valuable unit of their time their skills to our projects.
#7 Purpose and profit
Purpose and profit are the foundation on which we will build sustainable solutions. Our work will focus on linking initiatives together into a value chain which serve their communities, create jobs and improve the social and economic status of the city.
A Worthy Investment
It’s worth investing your time and energy in tough problems because they have the annoying trait of being really interesting. That’s why they draw us in and why to have a certain amount of control over us, it’s why they are worth sacrificing parts of our sanity for. We can’t avoid failure, but we can plan for what will most likely be a very bumpy ride.
