You likely know very little about Estonia. You can be forgiven. It is a country of 1.3 million people on the Baltic Sea. It would surely be part of Scandinavia if climate, location and language were the main criteria, but it just misses out because, for most of its history, it has been occupied by other countries, including Denmark, Germany and, on various occasions and up to the 1990s, Russia. I was there last week to participate in a session at the Creative Destruction Lab’s latest site. But my main goal was to learn more about what has made this country tick because it really ticks.
There are two outstanding ways in which Estonia now leads the world. First of all, it is the country with the most $1 billion-plus valued start-ups per capita. 10 in all, including Skype, (Transfer)Wise, and Bolt. That’s the same number as Australia, a country with 20 times more people. Across the Baltic, Sweden, with 4 times more people, has 7. Something is happening in Estonia, and it would be clearly useful to understand what.
The second outstanding accomplishment of Estonia is its digital society. It is really digital. The entire government is paperless, with all but one service being able to be done online; that one service … divorce. But it also operates according to a set of principles. One great one is that people should only have to enter their information once. You might be wondering what that means. It means that if you have told the government at any point your address, you don’t have to tell it again. If you have told the government your income for 2022, you don’t have to tell it again. If you have told the government that you are married, it is there, everywhere. Does that mean everyone in government knows all this stuff about you? No. Estonians control access to all of this information. It is just that if you have told one part something, you should not expect to have to repeat yourself. Now that I have told you this, you will start to notice how often you have to repeat yourself, not just to governments but to everyone. By simply providing an example, Estonia changes our own expectations of what to expect.
On the digitisation of government, I could go on. It clearly requires great technical skills, including privacy management, identification and cybersecurity. It is a model for public-private partnerships — the private businesses built much of the infrastructure. The point here is that it exists. And it is not just government services but things like voting and education that are digitised. When Covid-19 struck, every household had a computer, and the whole communities, including the teachers, knew how to deal with online classes. Want to read more about all of this; then I recommend Nathan Heller’s New Yorker piece from 2017.
What I wanted to know, however, was why. Why was Estonia able to do all of this? In my mind, there was a combination of starting from a clean slate — although its neighbours, Latvia and Lithuania, had that. But also likely the vision of those setting up the government. I knew that was the top-level story, but what I wanted to know is what of all this might be exported elsewhere. Basically, I wanted what they were having.
What I learned is that it was not obvious. Given the picture I painted, you might have expected that to visit Estonia is to see a Wakanda-like techno-future. But I saw none of that. There was nothing obviously digital about the place. There were no robots wandering around or fancy ways of ordering food. If you didn’t know about the digital government, you wouldn’t see it going around as a non-resident. Tallinn, the largest city, where I was, was a typical modern European city with centuries of structures marking its evolution. The only clue something was a little different is that there seemed to be lots of electric scooters.
However, I was able to glean that the story was more complicated than the top-level read. For instance, I figured that the principle that “no information be required more than once” was a good IT management design value that was adopted once Estonia realised that it was trying to do it. It turns out that was not the case. It was enshrined in law before they did anything as a way of legally mandating that solutions be found to make different data repositories interoperable. In other words, it was a design value encoded in a political institution first as a way of forcing directed effort. In other words, this suggested that you could actually direct these things rather than have them evolve as a matter of taste.
So I came back from my three-day visit more intrigued and eager to learn. I intend to do that and report back my findings here. For the moment, I recommend popping Estonia on your radar. We need to pay more attention.