Author: Jeremie Averous

How Nature Always Reminds Us That Rare, Short Catastrophic Events Shape the World

In many natural science domains, we increasingly become conscious that in nature, 95%+ of the change we observe comes from short and intense phenomena such as storms, floods, earthquakes.

train_floodFor example in the study of erosion, rivers shapes and material that is then transported by rivers such as boulders, it is very clear that rare storms and floods are the main contributors to the shaping of the riverbed (and sometimes, to the destruction of some man-made structures that tempted to tame it). While most textbooks still present erosion as the continuous work of air and water over millenniums, in reality, most of the work has been done during much shorter periods -days- of intense flow.

It does similarly happen in the world that surrounds us. Most of the changes come from unpredictable, short and intense moments, which we often call crisis (or also, in the field of society, revolutions). Crisis create the conditions for re-shaping our society, our economy, our organizations. Our duty is to protect ourselves and our loves ones against those crisis, and also to take advantage of them when they happen – because ultimately it is those rare events that shape our environment.

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How Our Energy Goes Where Our Intention Goes

I had lately a great Tai Chi introductory session, where I had a live experience that where our intention goes, so goes your energy.

Tai_chiIt was a simple experience of trying to resist a partner bending my arm. Without any particular instruction, that prove possible (with some exertion). With the instruction of focusing on trying at the same time to reach with one’s arm a distant point (intention), it proved impossible for the partner. In this simple experiment, nothing else had changed (in particular, not the strength of the partner).

This simple experience shows the power of our intention on what we can achieve. Where we have a very strong intention on a (not too) distant purpose, we can just be really invincible. Our focus overcomes all efforts to resist. Nothing can bend us anymore.

Let’s be clear on our intention, and with our focus, we won’t be influenced any more by external forces. Our energy will flow towards our intent.

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Why Innovation is about Creating Effective Conversations

Hugh McLeod writes in a post: “If your company isn’t innovating, it’s likely because no one is facilitating the right conversations”

Innovation-ConversationFurther he writes, “In Gapingvoid’s long experience working with Fortune 500 companies, we’ve found they all have the same problem. When communication shuts down, so does innovation. And it isn’t lack of money, talent or resources. What’s missing is the interpersonal. They either don’t like each other or don’t like talking to each other or both.”

Ideas are generating by the encounter and the mix with other ideas (see for example our post ‘Idea Multiplication‘). Innovative companies must have the right conversations to foster innovation. This often needs to be facilitated – either simply through the architecture (creating places to foster encounters) or through facilitation. It takes some effort to create meaningful, powerful conversations – and they are so needed in most organizations!

Create powerful conversations, and you will create innovation. So simple!

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Watch the video and slides of my May 2014 talk at Lycee Hoche (in French)

Did you miss it? The video and the slides of my speech at the Lycee Hoche in Versailles (France) are now available (in French).

Conference Jeremie AverousThe topic of this speech at my former high school was about my career – and I couldn’t help add something about the Fourth Revolution as well. It is a good introduction to the Fourth Revolution in French.

When is comes to presenting my career, it is an exercise that I don’t do too often and it was kind of funny to see how in hindsight a lot of what I have done and the choices I made, make an awful sense. In particular, my leaning towards project-based environments, and my international career. While these choices were at the time probably mostly driven by curiosity, luck and serendipity, they seem now to wave into a coherent framework. It is also probably because in the process I forgot quite a lot about other stuff that did not work out!

Watch the talk on Youtube here (if you can’t see the video, here is the link)

The segment on the Fourth Revolution starts here.

Happy viewing!

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Why Giving the Right Impulse at the Right Moment is More Effective than Continuous Effort

When it comes to achieving results, it is more important to put the right effort at the right moment than to row continuously up to exhaustion.

raftingThat is what I learnt when I was lucky enough a few weeks ago to experience rafting in the Alps mountains. How does that work? You let yourself flow down a torrential river on some air filled rubber raft. As a beginner, you have to follow the orders of an experienced helmsman.

The way it worked was very instructive: most of the time we just let ourselves be taken by the flow (which was a very pleasurable moment); only at determined moments was decisive effort required to maneuver in rapids, in a concerted and quick effort. And even when it came to avoid an obstacle, the point was to strike an effective compromise between effort and letting oneself be pushed by the flow. And all in all, it was more effective to row powerfully at short, decisive moments, than try to row hard all along.

This event was a teambuilding with a client, and as such this was a great learning point for all sorts of organizational change: the point is not to try to try to constantly try to go against the flow, nor to exhaust oneself trying to resist the force of the organization’s natural evolution. The point is to identify the short moments of intense effort that are sufficient to bring the boat to the chosen safe trajectory. It is about knowing that you need to let go most of the time except well chosen, intense moments. Great learning!

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New Africa Mobile Phone Statistics – Expect the Fourth Revolution to Spread Like Wildfire

Gallup published some extremely striking statistics of mobile phone penetration in Africa. In most African countries, more than two-third of the households have a mobile phone in 2013!! And in a number of countries that can be considered to be quite poor (Uganda, Ivory Coast etc.), more than 75% of the households have one!

cell phone usage in AfricaThis is an incredible penetration rate which shows that today, owning a mobile phone is probably considered to be a basic need by most of humankind.

It is also a sign of hope that access to significantly better communication capabilities will foster the development of Africa economies.

The other statistics that is extremely interesting in this paper is the following:

Gallup_phone_ownership_per_incomeThis confirms that mobile phone ownership is considered a must even by the poorest and that it is not just a fancy equipment for rich people. A Revolution has started. We probably have not seen its consequences yet, but it is coming. And it will surprise us.

Related post: How the Fourth Revolution Reaches every Corner of the Planet.

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How Most Consulting Projects Fail For Not Taking Into Account Emotional Needs

“Why do most consulting projects fail? The reason is, processes (read: consultants) don’t normally link the outcomes of the project to the emotional needs of the people involved. How the little things they do, affect other people. This is where organizations with an entrepreneurial mindset have a powerful advantage.” – Hugh MacLeod.

lean sigma DMAIC
Will this improvement method touch the hearts of the contributors?

Consultants conventionally come with great rational methods to improve things, and often do fail in their implementation. Because clearly, they don’t touch the heart of people when it comes to changing. And it is not by developing even more rational methods – or putting nice, attractive colors on complicated diagrams – that they will get the required emotional involvement.

The more I am participating to change programs, or execution of projects, the more I realize that emotional connection is the single key that unlocks the potential of organization and enables change.

Do your emotional work first, create meaning, and just use rational methods as a useful support. Don’t do it reverse. That is the recipe for successful change and therefore, successful consulting.

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Historical Perspective on the Development of Weak Ties

Following on our previous post on “How the Fourth Revolutions Enhances the Power of Weak Ties” I find interesting to observe the history of weak ties throughout the different periods we have identified in the Fourth Revolution book: the Hunter-Gatherer Age, the Agricultural Age and the Industrial Age.

Hostile_African_tribe
In the Hunter-Gatherer Age, Weak Ties were inexistent

As clearly exposed by Jared Diamond in his latest book “The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn From Traditional Societies“, in the Hunter-Gatherer Age, weak ties did not exist. You were part of the tribe or not. If you were not part of the tribe we had to fight you as a basis (before any attempt at discussion). This is still observed with tribes that had never any contact withe the outside.

In the Agricultural Age, with the advent of Writing, Empires and Cities, weak ties developed, mainly within the wider urban community. Still the extended family (the ‘blood’) and unions between families remained extremely important and essential, before considering any additional relationships.

In the Industrial Age, with the advent of printing and long distance communication of ideas, weak links became much more important. There are a number of instances where weak ties played important roles in particular in the community of scholars, who were exchanging correspondence and ideas all over Europe. It also extended to the skilled workforce and artisans. However, because of the technical limitations, long distance weak links were still difficult to maintain and communication infrequent.

Finally the Fourth Revolution and the Collaborative Age will allow us to fully leverage our weak ties to a much wider and dispersed community of people.

Ideas are breeding through chance encounters with other ideas. They breed through our weak links. With these weak links becoming easier, more global and prevalent, how can the Collaborative Age not be an Innovation Age?

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How the Fourth Revolutions Enhances the Power of Weak Ties

The Fourth Revolution value creation is all about releasing the power of weak ties. In our social environment we have strong and weak ties, depending on how frequently and tightly we maintain our relation to other people.

strong-weak social ties representationApparently the statistics is that we maintain on average a dozen very close contacts, about 150 medium to strong ties, and about 500 to 1,500 weak ties. Identification of this structure of our social network is not new, for example this paper on ‘The Strength of Weak Ties’ in the American Journal of Sociology in 1973.

The paper is a bit lengthy but the conclusion is clear: “weak ties […] are seen indispensable to individuals’ opportunities and to their integration in communities; strong ties, breeding social cohesion, lead to overall fragmentation“.

Weak ties create opportunities. This is repeatedly demonstrated for example by people looking for new work as testified for example in this post “the power of loose ties“. Or by our common experience that often, opportunities come from people with whom we are only remotely connected.

The successful social networks that define the Fourth Revolution are all about making the usage of weak ties easier, quicker and more frequent. Think about Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn. Their power lies not in the direct connections but in the “friends of our friends”.

The Collaborative Age is the Age where we leverage our weak ties.

More information? Link to a general discussion of Interpersonal ties and social networks structure on Wikipedia.

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Why Management’s Job is to Build the Capability to Recover if Failures Occur

“Management’s job is not to prevent risk but to build the capability to recover when failures occur” – says Ed Catmull, president of Pixar. While it is possibly a bit stretched (why not prevent known risks if easy?), this value has a great value in the world of uncertainty we are leaving in.

freak train accident
Freak event – all resides in how senior leadership will now react!

This brings us to the need to have reserves to cater for unknown- unknowns, the fact that our environment is generally shaped by short events of major crisis, and many topics we have discussed at length in this blog.

This also indicates that it is essential that leaders of an organization are not completely swamped by the day-to-day operations but have spare capacity available to do this important job nobody else in the organization can do (because those generally in charge of Enterprise Risk Management do not have the level of authority to really consider disruptive events).

Senior leadership’s role is to be able to manage disruption in a positive way for their organization, when it happens, and this requires a lot of preparation. Because luck is not luck, it is just good preparation.

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Why Internal Stability is So Important in an Unpredictable World

Following up on an idea from Robert Branche in ‘Les Radeaux de Feu’ (only available in French), living organisms have organized themselves in the face of the inevitable increase in unpredictability of the world by increasingly developing internal stability.

penguins
Penguins maintain internal stability (homeostasis) independently from the external conditions – which can be very unpredictable

This is the case very visibly in mammals: they are clearly the dominant species, they have resisted to many cataclysms, and they are at the same time the animals that maintain the most stable internal environment with a constant internal temperature, glucose levels etc. This is called homeostasis.

Robert Branche takes this observation in the realm of organizations, and concludes that homeostasis is a necessary condition to thrive in an ever more unpredictable world: internal stability is necessary to properly manage external changes. It is important to maintain that internal stability and not let oneself be too much driven by external conditions.

This comes with a warning however – according to Robert, “the existence of internal order and rules must not reduce uncertainty, but make its development and acceptance easier“. The organization should not disconnect itself from reality for the sake of maintaining its internal stability.

Still I find this idea very valid that the most successful organisms and organizations thrive in an evermore unpredictable world by maintaining internal stability, which gives them the capability to respond instead of just reacting. How stable is your organization internally in the face of external changes?

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How to Detect Passion

The other day I was challenged on LinkedIn to give a definition to Passion. I gave the following: “a passion is something that keeps your mind busy even if you’re not at it“.

human-excellence-passionWe all need passion in our life and it is the root of our achievements – in any area where that is applicable. Passion is needed for us to have the courage, do the effort and the work that these achievements do require.

How do we know we have uncovered a passion? Just because we can’t stop thinking about it – at all times and even when we would be supposed to be focused on something else.

Do you recognize yourself in this definition of passion?

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