Jeremie Averous | The Fourth Revolution Blog

Why We Would Have Smartphones Today Even Without Steve Jobs – and the Inevitability of the Fourth Revolution

We do hail Steve Jobs for inventing the smartphone in the shape of an iPhone (and other marvels of modern technology). Yet today we see that this technology is becoming mainstream and ubiquitous. So, would this invention have happened even without Steve Jobs’s genius? The answer is yes, and probably not too late after it happened thanks for Apple.

Steve Jobs with an iPhone — What has Steve Jobs really invented?

There are a lot of pointers in the form of past inventions occurring simultaneously (such as for example, the telephone, the theory of evolution etc) described for example in the excellent book ‘What Technology Wants‘ by Kevin Kelly. This shows that when the technological environment is mature, key inventions tend to happen naturally. If one does not invent it, so does another. Not everyone can bring a new technological invention to effective realization, but the world is big enough that several organizations can come simultaneously to similar results.

The great expansion of Android devices shows that the technological ecosytem was about ripe when Apple came out with the iPhone. The conversation about the convergence of cameras, phone and computer features was around already since the early 2000’s. The genius of Steve Jobs was to be the first to bring everything together in a well designed solution; but simultaneously many were not very far from a workable product with similar features. Technology was simply mature for the change. Steve Jobs brought its realization forward by a few months or years, but it would have happened eventually.

The same happens with the Fourth Revolution; as our long distance interactive communication capability has been created, the transformations of the Fourth Revolution are inevitable. We can’t predict who will be the first, where, but we know they will happen – and sometimes take shape simultaneously in several places.

Why Difficult Conversations are Key to Success in Change Initiatives

In the book ‘Difficult Conversations‘ written by members of the Harvard Negotiation Group, the authors state: “We believe a major reason change efforts so often fail is that successful implementation eventually requires people to have difficult conversations. The ability to manage difficult conversations effectively is foundational to achieving almost any significant change.”

It is quite true that real change – either personal or at the level of an organization always require to address existing issues in an open and straightforward manner, while making sure the people involved still listen. It is about holding the adequate tough conversations. And it is unfortunately rare to find people who have the skill and courage to hold these conversations.

The authors add: “With everyone taking for granted that their own view is right, and readily assuming that others’ opposition is self-interested, progress quickly grinds to a halt. Decisions are delayed, and when finally made they are often imposed without buy-in from those who have to implement them. Relationships sour. Eventually people give up in frustration, and those driving the effort get distracted by new challenges or the next next big thing.” Such is the recipe for failure of change efforts.

Don’t follow this recipe; instead, learn to hold difficult conversations in an effective and productive way. In a few minutes you can change people, one by one; or the entire world if needed.

How Scientific Publishing Gets Deeply Disrupted by the Fourth Revolution

Scientific Publishing – the system whereby scientific papers are peer reviewed and published by specialized publishers, is being deeply transformed by the Fourth Revolution. “Watch This Multi-Billion-Dollar Industry Evaporate Overnight” says Dylan Tweeney on a post, describing how open publishing and reviewing is profoundly revolutionizing the scientific paper publishing industry.

scientific paper and journals published by a handful of intermediaries - soon a thing of the past? — Scientific paper and journals published by a handful of intermediaries – soon a thing of the past?

One of the main issues for the interested dabbler in science is that it is almost never possible to access important scientific papers without paying significant fees. I am not a scientist, merely an interested member of the public, and this barrier is a barrier to spreading knowledge in the wider society. And more – why would a small number of publishers benefit when most writers and peer-reviewers do the work for free? Scientific publishing sometimes looks like an oligopoly held by a few entrenched publishers.

Sites like Academia.edu propose to change fundamentally the balance of power in this industry, and basically to wipe out the intermediaries – publishers – which added value is now squashed by the internet. In their latest blog post about reaching the bar of 10 million users, the founder states “It would be a great thing if we could get every science PDF ever written on the internet, available for free. There is a lot of work to do before we make that vision a reality, but this 10 million user milestone is a good start”. A good start – we can already predict that within a few years, the entire system for producing, reviewing and making science available will be transformed for the better of humankind!

How We Are At the Brink of the Effective Real Birth of Artificial Intelligence

“The technium contains 170 quadrillion computer chips wired up into one mega-scale computing platform. The total number of transistors in this global network is now approximately the same as the number of neurons in your brain. And the number of links among files in this network (think of all the links among all the web pages of the world) is about equal to the number of synapse links in your brain. Thus, this growing planetary electronic membrane is already comparable to the complexity of a human brain.” – explains Kevin Kelly in a great book, What Technology Wants (published 2010!).

This amazing statistics reminds us both that:

We are incredibly complex creatures
We have created with the internet a technological marvel that starts to equate the complexity of thinking people.

Now this just comes as Elon Musk the founder of Tesla and SpaceX, tweets that artificial intelligence is dangerous: “Hope we’re not just the biological boot loader for digital super-intelligence. Unfortunately, that is increasingly probable“.

It is quite frightening and exciting to anticipate what artificial intelligence will create. Because artificial intelligence will soon be a reality, there does not seem to be any doubt in the minds of specialists. The futurist Ray Kurzweil is quoted in the same article as declaring: “It will not be us versus the machines … but rather, we will enhance our own capacity by merging with our intelligent creations“. What will really happen? Terminator or enhancement of our capabilities? In any case, change is coming!

Why You Should Exercise to Regain Your Balance – and Not to Keep It!

From far, the lives of successful people seem highly balanced and straightforward. Not to from close – success breeds from unbalance and exploration beyond one’s comfort zone.

Sensei Aikido — O Sensei, the founder of Aikido, in action

After observing O Sensei, the founder of Aikido, sparring with an accomplished fighter, a young student said to the master, “You never lose your balance. What is your secret?” “You are wrong” O Sensei replied. “I am constantly losing my balance. My skill lies in my ability to regain it.”

Good lesson – We need to exercise our ability to regain our balance so as to stay healthy and continue to do what we need to do. But we should accept to be thrown off balance to thrive in action.

Related Posts

How Battery Technology is the Unrecognized Key Collaborative Age Enabler

We take for granted the small parts that power most of the devices we use – long lasting, rechargeable batteries. Still in some sort, battery technology is a key enabler of our modern way of life, and technology progress has been dramatic in that field. And more is to come as the total capacity of batteries increase and could change electrical power distribution overall.

Batteries power all our portable devices, giving us freedom of movement like never before. Our devices become increasingly long-lasting and powerful, allowing us to work, entertain ourselves, and communicate from wherever we are. In a way they enable the Fourth Revolution by removing the constraint of localization close to a wired network. In Africa they power mobile phones which are the only way to communicate effectively. Battery-powered cars also become increasingly a possible mainstream technology for moving around.

There is more: Industrial Age electricity generation technology did not involve storage of power which required to maintain at all times, equal production and consumption on power grids, leading to issues as daily consumption is highly variable depending on the time, weather and day of the week. This is today a limit to the development of ‘green’ power sources as wind and solar power is highly variable and somewhat unpredictable. Increasing their share on the grid leads to substantial issues for the grid managers – sometimes adding more windmills requires adding more fuel and coal power stations to have extra capacity to cater for peaks in demand and slumps in production!

tesla battery — Batteries in everything – the Tesla car battery

With ambitions to build megafactories for batteries, that may change as well. Elon Musk’s announced strategic move to build a ‘Gigafactory’ is controversial. But the fact that the idea to increase production capacity (one single factory to produce more battery capacity than the current total worldwide production!) to lower the cost of batteries is in the air – and, provided the availability of raw material follows, will change significantly the landscape of power generation as well.

Batteries – the small, discrete technology that is changing our world more than we would ever realize!

How the Fourth Revolution Fosters both Smart Generalists and Super Specialists

While the Industrial Age was marked by increasing specialization, the “Return of the Generalist” in society is a common theme in many books. It has been recognized already in 2005 by Dan Pink in his book “A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future“, and I found the issue further developed in an interesting book, “The Rise of the Naked Economy: How to Benefit from the Changing Workplace” by Ryan Coonerty and Jeremy Neuner.

generalist-specialist — Generalist vs Specialized, an obsolete opposition

In this book about the future of work and of the workplace, they identified two key players in the “Naked Economy” of the future: big-picture thinkers, who they call the Smart Generalists, and the small-bore experts, the Super Specialists. The two are complementary. In our future project-based working environment, Smart Generalists will coordinate the work of Super Specialists, and both will have tremendous value.

In the book, the author mention that “My value, like all generalists’, is to know a little about a lot. That means the onus is on me to constantly reach out to new people, read books and articles, watch the trends in a wide range of arenas, and generally be passionately interested in the world. Having that broad knowledge to draw on, and to be able to use it when I need it, brings me a lot of credibility when I’m dealing with people in business, government, or academia.”

The Smart Generalist is coming back, watch for the change in the workplace!

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Why You Should Ditch the 10,000 Hours Rule in Favor of the 1,000 or Even 100 Hour Rule

The 10,000 hours rule, popularized by the author Malcolm Gladwell, states that you need 10,000 hours of practice to become a master of anything. Great. That’s an awful lot of time in particular for focused practice.

James Altucher notes that “10,000 hours is a lot of time. It’s anywhere from 5-30 years of your life. And then you die. And what do you show for it? That you’re great at watercolor painting. Not everyone is going to be the Beatles. That involves some luck also.” He argues that in reality, 1,000 hours are often enough to reach a sufficient level to be proficient and well above the average. Maybe not a master, but at least a very good practitioner, and among the best in the world at it. And 1,000 hours are much more accessible. It means in particular that it is possible to develop high proficiency in a number of areas, instead of just mastery in a single area.

Even better, according to him, “In fact, if you get good at learning new things, then you can even take another zero off. The 100 hour rule. Or maybe 200 hours. This makes life a LOT better and more fun. You can take that zero off after you get really good at the first thing. Because then you have learned how to learn. So that saves a lot of energy on the next thing you learn.”

So, let’s start to learn how to learn and have more fun while reaching ‘best in the world’ proficiency in a number of areas!

How Success Can’t Happen Without Both Will And Luck

As the saying says, success is due to talent in some part, and also to luck. And great success is just a bit more of talent, and a great chunk of additional luck. We need to recognize that luck is a key ingredient to what we become.

It is tough to accept that our destiny is shaped in a large part by luck. We would like to think that it is just our talent and our efforts – our will. The role of luck stems directly from the complexity of the world around us – and its unpredictability.

And indeed there is a large part of modern auto-determination thinking that suggests that you can shape your destiny the way you want. In a certain way, Coaching relies on this assumption by enabling people to act in the direction they choose. Thus, will can shape your destiny, to a certain point.

And will and luck are not independent. On the luck side, there also ways to attract more of it, like for example maintaining a healthy and diverse network that will expose you to more opportunities – something that you do consciously.

The balance between will and luck, how they fight and synergize, is not easy to define. If either ingredient is missing, we won’t reach our expectations. The balance is difficult to find and might depend on the circumstances. In any case, make sure part of your will is devoted to increase your luck!

My New Book is Out: Practical Cost Control Handbook for Project Managers

I am very proud to announce that my new book, the Practical Cost Control Handbook for Project Managers, has just been published. It is not a all-publics book like the previous ones, still it results from significant effort and continuous improvements in the past 3 years. It is the public version of a book that has been already produced as an internal handbook for a few clients, selling more than 1,000 copies already of previous versions.

It is available worldwide through all online bookshops, and is also available as a Kindle version! Here are the links to Amazon.com for the paperback version and for the Kindle version.

This must-have practical handbook for Large, Complex Projects originated in the trenches of actual project execution.
It is not a heavy and detailed bible, but rather a practical reference for project practitioners to understand the principles and traps of Cost Control and Forecasting and be able to raise the right challenges to their teams.
Proper Cost Control and Forecasting must support the Project Manager’s decision making; unfortunately, that is still rarely the case. This handbook explains how to better implement these key processes, thereby improving significantly the odds of maintaining projects under control and taking the right decisions at the right time.

If you are interested, here is an exclusive link to the table of contents and index and to the foreword and introduction.

For those keen on project management, I will publish two more books in the next 12 months or so: a book about project risk management, and a book about schedule management in large projects.

How the Conventional Organization too Often Crushes True Prioritization

Further to our post on “How to Truly Prioritize: a Vital Skill for Success“, I would like to mention how I observe that most organizations seem to be creating a Brownian movement that leads us in the opposite direction from correct prioritization (i.e., stop doing what is not a priority).

Meetings - one of worst killers of quality time spent on real priorities — Meetings – one of worst killers of quality time spent on real priorities

Meetings too often suck out time from real productive work on priority issues and are often unproductive
Other people constantly come with new issues and topics that add up on our list of to-do actions with no true priority ranking (or, worse, too many use a priority based on the rank of the originator multiplied by the implied urgency)
Emails and other interruptions caused by our modern communication tools pollute the time we could spend concentrating of priority (thus, hard) work
etc.

Ask yourselves how much time you really spend on what you have identified as your top priorities for the year. Got it? Really? Research has shown that the time you think you spent on these actions in reality was probably one half or one third of what you think, if an independent observer was really looking at what you are spending your time on!

Fight the natural trend of organizations to create movement for the sake of justifying their existence. Priorities once defined should occupy a significant chunk of your time. That’s the only way to be really effective. A good way is to define spans of time out of the usual operational emergencies to make sure to make good progress on what is really important. Are you ready for it?

How to Truly Prioritize: a Vital Skill for Success

In my coaching, training and consulting activities, I encounter again and again the same phenomenon: people say they prioritize – but in effect they don’t. And those who really do are those that rise to be successful.

stop doing what is not important (even if looks urgent!)

What is true prioritization? To put it simply, it is not to do what is not deemed to be a priority. That sounds simple but that is where most of us fail.

Everybody can run some kind of prioritization scheme and decide that some actions are indeed, priority actions. But when it comes to stopping to do the rest, that is where people stall. Objections abound, caused by our fear of being threatened by unexpected events. For example, lately I was giving a course on project risk management; and when I came to saying that people should drop any action that was not in the top-10 priority list and merely monitor those risks, all sorts of excuses were given. Of course, a risk might materialize that was not in the priority list, but does that mean that we should not focus our attention and limited action capability to truly critical actions? If the risk is not in the priority list, it is less important and less essential (by definition), compared to those that are really critical!

It’s tough but necessary: true prioritization is about not doing what is not deemed a priority. You can monitor these things, but focused action will be much more effective than spreading your time and attention chasing too many things at the same time. Prioritize truly and multiply your impact on the world by easily a factor of 5 to 10!

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