What’s the Question?

Getting to a sustainable, durable economy means asking the right questions. Anna Jaffe, in a quest to build the right car, is building a network to do just that.

We say “right car” because her project began where so few projects do: what is the question? What would the right car look like?

We recently had the pleasure of hearing Anna, a remarkable young woman, speak at a school in Princeton. Ms. Jaffe, an MIT student who, when asked what was her most important tool, replied “differential equations, because that’s how you learn to manage change.”

In seeking to build the right car, she worked with a group of fellow students and faculty at MIT, to develop a collaborative structure that would allow her group to tap into other great minds, whether they were in Africa or Italy, China or Venezuela. Needing to find some common denominator to facilitate communication, they have two rules:

• At least 40% of a team from outside the US should speak English, and documents would be translated into English
• They would try to meet in person at least once a month.  Due to the difference in Visa rules for various countries, some attend virtually-by computer.

The next step was to build a framework based on values and goals that the community would develop, and provide the group with access to the key tools needed to implement their ambitious project: financing, industry support, fabrication and more. The team developed a matrix of 67 values that would drive the project and all teams. They ranged from, “Must get 200 mpg” to a request from a mechanic who said, “I don’t want to get grease on my hands.”

They also considered that the car must be responsive to the needs of different climates and communities: a car that worked well in India would be unlikely to work as well in Iceland; one that ran in a heavily urban area with plenty of stations and a need for few miles might not meet the needs of a rural population that traveled hundreds of miles between few stations.

Her collaborative model is a good model for asking the question, “What will a sustainable economy in a resource constrained world look like?” By starting where Anna started, that means defining the values and the teams necessary for implementing a durable economy.

Sounds simple.

What’s the problem? We focus on the how and not the why.

We are all trying to rebuild the economy without any clear ground rules for it should look like: what are the basic values that we want from the outcome?  How much should people work?  If any system supports less than 100% employment, what are the responsibilities of the system and the rights of the unemployed?  How much money should we make and in relation to what benchmark?  How much energy would we ideally use?  How much energy can we realistically expect to become renewable?  In a capitalist system, what is the relationship between commerce and education?

We could go on. In this new world of changing climates and depressed markets, how do we start to imagine a future, where the values that we talk about motivate our quest for economic realities?

To date, Anna Jaffe and her team have traveled all over the world, building, testing, and improving their model. They are serious contenders for the $10M Automotive X Prize (AXP). We seriously wish them all the best, and look forward to wathing whatever they do next.