By Sandra Hambach.

Today we started talking about Lack of Loyalty (LoL), Save our Society (S.O.S.) and later on about the start-up Livingstone. The company is willing to take the challenge and opportunity to enter the market with a disruptive food system to provide food to people all over the world. They combine urban horticulture, blockchain technology and cryptocurrency into one system with the aim to gain a more efficient and qualitative better food distribution system. The discussion about LoL turned out to be a big issue concerning working procedures and the way we will deal with each other in future. I started to think about it and I was questioning “why are things changing?”.

Many ways could be developed to change food trade, the way we deliver food to everybody or save the environment. But, the keywords blockchain and cryptocurrency popping up. Is it a result of digitization process of the last decades? Is blockchain and cryptocurrencies really the future that will help us to make things better? Or is it just a different way with the same difficulties we have to face right now? Does the generation Z really have a better understanding of new technologies?

LoL is a wordplay about the behavior of Generation Z (1995 and younger). In particular, Generation Z wants to have a positive impact on environment and the society which is misinterpreted by the older generations as lack of loyalty. Having in mind, that the people of Generation Z grew up highly connected in virtual environments, it’s getting apparent that they want to act in their professional career differently to that procedures the “old ones” worked with. They seemingly have a different attitude in terms of employment a company. They want determine their selves and don’t want to follow old habits and especially “old school” working procedures. If you ask them to work on something they are highly motivated to do new things. When I remember my first apprenticeship, I had to learn from people who are more experienced. What I never liked was to do things I didn’t agree with, but I understood quickly that there are many things I can learn from the older colleagues. Thus, I sometimes had to compromise myself.

“I don’t wonder that younger generations ask for the sense of working processes. New working processes or technologies enter the marked and everybody talks about it. But in many companies, only “old school” working processes exist.”

Jan Bathel, Ignore Gravity

 

If we talk about blockchain, cryptocurrencies or urban horticulture we have to bring first everybody on the same level. People must have the chance to understand what is going on or in order to it be part of a change. (In whatever way). How can we assume that the younger generation understands what is going on in our heads, when they have so many inputs from different sources? Or if we can’t explain what is changing? We are all in a way emotionally driven and decide on experiences we already have made. So they do!

Here we are. The world gets more and more transparent and many people like that. We want to know what is going on and we feel a little bit safer if we have some background knowledge. Generation Z is questioning things and wants to have an answer. They don’t want to denounce.

These days constitutions and/or companies are under pressure to improve, renew or optimize processes to meet the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). At the same time, we want to disrupt the finance system while we try to understand each other. Not to forget that we have cultural changes in the world. I think many roadworks have to be handling in the same time.

Livingstone has an excellent approach of how to feed the world. The idea is a horticultural farm that can be scaled up and used everywhere in the world. To share transparent productions conditions and allow fair trading conditions blockchain technology is used. Farmers will have all over the world access to data and are therefore able to pre-finance the urban horticulture farm due to cryptocurrency.

When we talked about this start-up, a few of us in our discussion group thought it is a big change they try to do. About all that, in the group we liked the idea of urban horticulture and to make it accessible for everybody. But, what bothered us was the idea of cryptocurrency. How can we trust such a system?! Can we trust the people?

It could be now interesting, how Generation Z thinks about it, but also Traditionals (born 1945 earlier). And it could be interesting to discuss about it with people from different disciplines.

(Image source/left: pixabay)