Jeremie Averous | The Fourth Revolution Blog

What happens when we are submitted to information overload

When submitted to information overload, “We focus on those signals that tell a story about the world as we would like it to be, not how it really is.” – Nate Silver (in his excellent book ‘The Signal and the Noise‘). Nate is an expert statistician, successful at forecasting various things from baseball to other sports to elections (he is the founder of a famous think tank called Five-Thirty-Eight which specializes in elections prediction (apparently it gave the best prediction of the last US presidential elections)).

Nate Silver explains that information overload might foster extremism and people retreating to their communities, hence sectarianism and possibly, fights between partisans. It is his interpretation of what happened when printing released information in the 15th century – great fights happened around Protestantism and numerous communities formed that tended to avoid contact with this new information coming rushing at them.

Following this thought, it might very well be a risk of modern life that the excess of available information would only create stronger beliefs in ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ and that we would be psychologically tempted to reject the bulk of it as a natural, defensive reflex. That could explain the increasing defensive communities that can be observed across the world.

We need to limit the amount of information we submit ourselves to – and at the same time find a way to keep an open mind. Be wary that many strange things we observe today might be due to information overload – and people picking and choosing only what aligns with their beliefs. That might be the key to understanding many behaviors.

Choose – be a critic or a hero?

Too often we praise critics instead of praising those that go down in the arena to do things – real stuff that is, that can change the world.

As Theodore Roosevelt so well said: “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better”.

Theodore Roosevelt continues: “The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

Are you exposing yourself in the arena or do you just watch from you cozy critic’s seat?

Hat tip to Robin Sharma.

How the fight against Patent Trolls continues: The White House in action!

The issue of Patent Trolls is now tackled at the highest level with, early June 2013, a White House communication on how it expects to address the issue of impediments to technology due to these nefarious actors: ” The White House issued five executive actions and seven legislative recommendations designed to protect innovators from frivolous litigation and ensure the highest-quality patents in our system“.

This comes in the general action to try to phase-out patent trolls (see our previous post on How Intellectual Property is Changing – Too Slowly but in the Right Direction). Now a number of comments on these executive orders from the White House imply that they are too weak and will not be efficient to curb the patent troll development. See for example this post on Quartz: “Why patent trolls will laugh in the face of the US government’s weak attempts to fight them“.

This issue of excessive patenting and undue burden on the economy will certainly remain very high on the agenda for the next few weeks and months. Let’s continue to observe how this institution will need to transform to deal with the changes of the Fourth Revolution!

How Intellectual Property is changing – too slowly but in the right direction

There are increasing calls for profound reform of intellectual property. This is a subject close to heart that we touched on in our posts Patent trolls and the end of conventional intellectual property and How patent litigation cost half a trillion dollar inefficiency in the last 20 years!.

What are the evolutions lately? This paper by Joseph Stiglitz “Lives versus profit” summarizes the incredible issue of companies that try to patent our genes, at the expense of us all. According to Joseth Stiglitz, “More broadly, there is increasing recognition that the patent system, as currently designed, not only imposes untold social costs, but also fails to maximize innovation“. And further, “unbalanced intellectual-property regimes result in inefficiencies – including monopoly profits and a failure to maximize the use of knowledge – that impede the pace of innovation“.

Things seem to be changing in the perception of lawmakers. A new proposed bill could end the worst patent troll behavior by simply getting them where are the most vulnerables – money. Read more about this initiative in the paper ‘Death to patent trolls: How a new bill could slay technology’s worst parasites‘. Patent trolls are just a nasty way of doing business by taking advantage of real innovators through old tactics such as intimidation and brutal force in front of a court. Let’s hope this bill will pass and be effective.

Reform of our intellectual property regime, one of the most important institutions of the Industrial Age, is a prerequisite for moving straight into the Collaborative Age. Those countries that will overcome the particular interests of some of their industries to reform effectively this field will have a significant competitive advantage. Why are so few doing it?

Why career management is like riding an absurd merry-go-round

A little useful etymology I stumbled upon – and which explains why career management is about riding a merry-go-round!

marry-go-round with adult — Do you feel you are going in circles on a never ending race? Maybe are you ‘managing your career’ Industrial Age style?

‘Career’ comes from the Middle-Age French carriere (race-course), itself a deformation from Latin. It thus means ‘racing’, a competition in scarcity where the few top positions are reserved to those who will be fastest or the strongest.
‘Manage’ comes from the Middle-Age French ‘mesnager’ or Italian ‘maneggiare’ which was used to mean ‘drive a horse’ or ‘hold the reins of a horse’.

I don’t know why and I associated the two ideas and suddenly I was looking at Industrial Age career management as people riding wooden horses on a merry-go-round, always racing and never getting anywhere. Just going around on an absurd race.

Strange thought?

Where is your current racing on the ‘career ladder’ really taking you?

How to overcome interruptions

Interruptions is the scourge of our modern life. It becomes increasingly difficult to concentrate on creating something without being disturbed.

time between interruption — Time between interruptions today is… Zero s

The curve on the right is somewhat ironic, but doesn’t it represent what we feel on a daily basis? Can you remember how life was before emails and mobile phones ? (I have difficulties on my side, although I lived the start of my adult life in that faraway time).

Actually I dropped twitter because its value is based on being constantly connected – tweets disappear after a few hours or even minutes.

It is essential to keep in your life moments without interruptions. There are even some paying applications that shut down internet on your computer! Yes, some are even paying! (visit for example the page for “Freedom” (10$) or “Self-Control” (free). [Curiously these applications seem to be only for Macs; either PC users don’t have internet or only those creative Apple freak seem to need paid applications to shut down internet on their computer!!]

Anyway, there is one simple way to avoid being constantly interrupted. It’s free even! The image on the left is self-explanatory.

When was the last time you did turn your gadgets off to enjoy a real, quality time without interruption?

Why Face-to-Face Meeting Will Not Become Obsolete Soon!

Recently, I have been working for a client who has deployed an advanced, high definition video-conference technique called Telepresence. It tries to simulate talking to people on the other side of the table.

I was amazed when a few weeks later I happened to meet physically with a person I had only seen before in video-conference and he announced we had already met. I was astonished. I had seen him, of course, but did I really “meet” him when I participated to this video-conference? I did not feel so.

Because a physical encounter involves much more than a video encounter – touching, reacting in a common environment, different perspectives on the person, a closer insight into his whole body language. Even in a few minutes you know more about the person than after 3h of videoconference! I also realize it is easier for me recognize people I have met physically than people I have only seen through video-conferencing.

The amount of data from a physical encounter with a person is still much higher than what technology can convey. Establishing a relationship at the emotional level can only happen with face-to-face encounters. And emotional connections are essential to work as an effective team. This is why I constantly recommend, in particular in the case of remote teams, to have teambuilding sessions involving most of the team, to build that emotional connection. Later remote work is then facilitated by the already established connection.

Face-to-face physical encounters with new people will always remain an essential need. Worldwide travel trends are not going to stop soon.

Why a tight co-located core is still required in organizations

Following on our post Why Face-to-Face Relationships Are Still Essential to a Creativity Culture, we need to recognize that some successful collaborative endeavors have flourished across continents in the past few years, using the tools of the Fourth Revolution: Linux, the Anonymous, Wikileaks, to name a few. Some high-tech companies like the acclaimed software company 37signals leverages a worldwide community of programmers, and it has become common practice to hire remote contractors anywhere in the world.

What is then the difference between those organizations which can work collaboratively and remotely, and those that require co-location to create the appropriate context for creating their value?

The actual difference is between the core of the organization and the collaborators. The core of the organization always requires tight collaboration, that always leads to co-location and face-to-face relationship. It is the only way to create effective teams that create incredible stuff. And when one looks at the great examples of remote collaboration, there is always a co-located core of the organization.

Around this core it is possible to leverage a more or less tightly knit network of (occasional or permanent) remote collaborators.

The size of the core depends on the activity, the type of project and the endeavor. Sometimes even it can remain at the level of one or two individuals for simple and straightforward creations. This is why it looks like sometimes it is pure remote collaboration.

The incredible value is always created in a co-located core of the organization. Where is your core?

Why Face-to-Face Relationships Are Still Essential to a Creativity Culture

When Marissa Meyer, the new CEO of Yahoo, banned full-time work from home last February she ignited a lot of criticism.

(see for example the Guardian’s article “Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer’s work-from-home memo is from bygone era“).

At the same time Apple is building a 3 billion dollars’ (now gone up to 5 billion dollars’) specially thought headquarters to lodge their employees and promote maximum collaboration.

Even with social networking and all these tools that make long distance interactive communication so present in our lives, does tele-working allow the right culture and collaboration to develop?

New Apple Headquarters — The new Apple headquarters: like many creative companies, Apple invests heavily in physical infrastructure to enhance collaboration

In the case of large companies like Yahoo and Apple, or even Facebook, it does not seem to work. Face-to-face collaboration, nurturing chance physical encounters on a campus seem to be the best way to foster creativity and productivity from collaboration. In the case of Yahoo, after one week of shock, papers started to appear showing that possibly, taking this decision was the only way to allow a new Yahoo culture to develop and flourish (see for example the paper “Marissa Mayer Got It Right — You Can’t Fix A Broken Culture When People Aren’t In The Office“).

The power of face-to-face relationships, their intensity and the unconscious exchanges that occur, are still central to collaboration. Or are they? In the next few posts we will explore the conditions in which collaboration can still happen remotely.

How 3D Printing Technology Shakes Consumer Protection Institutions

3-D printing is already shaking our institutions. The recent issue of a 3D printed gun – and the availability of the drawings for free on the web – has scared many. Governments are already considering how they should change the regulations around weapon acquisition and export; on the other side hackers defend the freedom of internet.

Cory Doctorow, an expert on the internet regulation (and generally, a proponent of a large freedom), fears that these events will lead to inappropriate regulations of internet content, due to the fact that judges and societies will be scared by the object.

For guns, regulations might change to address ammunition rather than guns (nobody has yet managed to 3-D print live ammunition and it will take a long time before anybody can do that), but in any case, drastic changes will necessarily happen.

Guns are a very polarizing issue. But what about more conventional liability for hurting someone with a 3D printed object, or damage to property? How liable would be the person who put the design on internet, in a 3D enthusiast forum and who lives at the other end of the planet? How would the entire sets of regulations developed to protect the consumer from defects in products need to change?

All these questions are in the air. Because the institution of manufacturing changes, so needs also the entire set of regulation, or regulatory authorities. It is just the start of a drastic revolution. Watch how it unfolds over the next few months!

How 3D-Printing Is Redefining our World Quicker than We Imagine

You will not have missed a few events that shook the news in the past few weeks and which are related to 3D printing, a new Fourth Revolution manufacturing technology (refer to our post on POD (print-on-demand) and 3-D printing):

the issues around 3D printing of guns and the availability of those drawings on the net to anyone, which by-passes all the weapons-control regulations that were based on conventional manufacturing traceability – see for example an Australian reaction here,
the fantastic rescue of a toddler with an artificial trachea that was 3D printed and will dissolve itself progressively as tissue will build around it (more on this here, here and here; the technique is not really new but always impressive: re-view also this great TED talk mentioned in our post Manufacturing Revolution reloaded: 3D printing of human organs is real!)

Like every new invention we can see here, almost at the same time, the two sides of it – the most beautiful at the same time as the ugly, destructive side.

But for the moment, is there a better proof that this new distributed manufacturing technology starts to shake the world as Chris Anderson predicts in his latest “Makers” book?

Remember the time where computers were huge expensive machines and people thought the personal computer would never happen and never be found useful? If you are working in a manufacturing industry, you’d better beware of what is going to happen as manufacturing becomes personal and decentralized!

First hand evidence that our traditional schools are obsolete (Video)

For those of you interested by education or training, the following video is a MUST-WATCH. It explains from where our current education comes from, why “schools as we know them are obsolete, why we don’t need them anymore”. It shows how children can learn collectively from a computer in a brick wall in India, and how a school can be built in the cloud with grand mothers and passionate adults to collaboratively educate millions of children.

It also shows how we can collectively learn much better than by ourselves! “In 9 months a group of Indian children left alone with a computer will reach the level of an office secretary in the West“. Amazing? Scary? How fast do you guess will tamil-speaking children in a remote village in South India learn the techniques of DNA replication in English by themselves? Watch out!

The next time you want to teach a group something completely new, dig a hole in the wall, put a computer with the topic and let them play with it until they get it!

For further insights on the issue of education, TED is curating a page dealing with the educational revolution (Re-imagining School), grouping all the talks about the topic.

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