Moving Beyond Transaction Thinking

One of the recurring themes of speakers at Pop!Tech, whether stated as such or not, is the notion that success in the future means re-learning to think beyond transactions.

First, a framework. In the commercial world, transactions are the way we do businesses. One party has one type of value that another wants, and that other person has an ability to trade a different type of value to the first party. Money becomes the proxy for this exchange. The value of the two items exchanged is determined immediately. This sort of transaction is the way that a huge number of our material, consumptive relationships progress.

Community is a bit different. Participants in communities of all kinds expect that the community is a source of strength, or value, for them. But to derive value from most communities, participants have to give in a way that is not transactional. You contribute to people within a community without knowing exactly how that value is going to come back to you. The currency is trust - or to use a more wonky term, social capital.

Two interesting places today where the notion of transaction has come up are YouTube and our Food System.

Kansas State University researcher Michael Wesch talked about how the community on YouTube responds to vulnerability and openness. But YouTube is fundamentally a-commercial for most content producers, at least in the sense that they're not being rewarded financially in a transaction based system. Of course, they are still deriving an immense amount of value - however they define it.

Michael Pollan, food researcher and author of "The Omnivore's Dilemma," and "In Defense of Food," gave an amazing overview of the food system. Perhaps the most profound observation was his assessment that people view themselves in a zero-sum relationship with nature; that when we take, nature is deleteriously impacted. That's the transaction thinking, except that nature has no say in the value it derives. Instead, Pollan urged us to think of ourselves in an ongoing, complex, and give and take relationship with nature that extends over time.

Food for thought. Pun Intended.

(Photo: Muffet)