Moving to the Collaborative Age is simple… but not easy!
Many organizations just touch collaborative tools from far, sometimes just using them as another broadcasting tool.
The thing is, organizations need to dramatically change their approach to be able to take advantage of all the value made available by the Collaborative Age.
This excellent post by Amber Naslund, The Ripple Effect: Why Social Business Isn’t Simple, is an excellent summary of some tactics organizations can adopt if their strategy is truly to move into the Collaborative field.
Still, whatever the techniques and tactics, something is required first. It is a deep commitment of the organization, at the highest level, to engage with the social community. Engagement means a two way conversation and emotional exchange. Engagement has a cost. It requires continuous maintenance. It requires emotional work and vigilance. Yet it can lead to fantastic stories and experiences.
Like everybody, you want to jump into the Collaborative World. Still – are you really deeply ready to engage emotionally with your network, with your customers and your entire ecosystem?
It’s a place behind us where we know we can go and rest, be protected and supported. A place we can relax and recover.
The stronger our secure base is, the keener we will be to take risks. Because we know that if we fail, our secure base will be here.
a strong secure base
Our very first secure base is our mother. And then over time we develop other secure bases – our significant other, our coach, close friends.
What’s important is to always have one strong secure base. People that don’t have one, or that lose their secure base suddenly, can have extreme reactions if they get stuck in the mourning cycle (more about that in the excellent book “hostage at the table” by George Kohlrieser, a hostage negotiator turned business school professor).
So, you want to move forward, do new things, experiment? Make sure your secure base is strong and that it will welcome you in whatever conditions you’ll end up. Strengthen your secure base as often as you can. The stronger the secure base, the bolder you will be, the more successful you will ultimately become. Invest in strengthening your secure base, it is not time lost.
Have you identified your secure base? Start strengthening it NOW!
Enjoy Christmas, reconnect with your secure base and strengthen it to achieve extraordinary things in 2012!!
Should multiple identities be allowed for a single individual on the internet?
The debate rages. Facebook and Google+ try to force everyone to show a single identity. Still, since the beginning of internet, geeks often like to have different identities for different purposes. A good reference is this blog post about the views of a typical geek, Chris Poole.
Showing different identities in parallel is extremely difficult in the real physical world. The few exceptions like a husband having several wives in different places, unbeknownst to the others, are strange enough to be good topics for Hollywood.
who will you be today on internet?
On the internet, however, it is quite easy to have several identities in parallel. And even if Facebook and Google+ try to force us into a single, lifetime identity, it is relatively easy to circumvent those controls – sharing networks is only more difficult, and having multiple identities is not practical for everybody.
Still, we all have multiple identities already. We don’t send on our corporate emails the same messages to the same people than from our personal email. We don’t network with the same people and discuss the same topics on Facebook and on LinkedIn.
This debate is thus futile. Yes, we have, and we all manage different identities. They are more or less consistent. But they are different. And the number of identities we will have will grow, and become more deeply different.
As the Fourth Revolution book argues, while the population on Earth might reach a plateau, the number of identities on internet will continue to grow tremendously. And this will create more value for everybody.
Don’t freak out. Maintain and develop your different identities on the internet!
the age of your friends on facebook, depending on your own age
The comment in the paper is mostly on the fact that we tend to connect with people of our age – there is a sharp spike, even at age 60.
Still this curve carries a lot of other very interesting information. The most obvious is that we tend to connect with younger people, not at all with people older than ourselves. And as a consequence, the generation in their 20’s appears to be very disconnected from the older generations.
What is the consequence? The generation in their 20’s, for which Facebook and other social networks is a normal part of the world, evolves rather independently. This is a sure source of Revolutions.
Brace! Driven by the generation born in the 1990’s, the Revolution is coming.
As I am currently transforming from ‘Employee’ to ‘Self-Employed’, which is not an easy moment, I now realize there is a further wide gap between ‘Freelancer’ and ‘Entrepreneur’! That’s quite a lot to overcome!
As Seth Godin clearly defines,
“A Freelancer is someone who gets paid for working.That means, the more you work, the more you get paid.
An Entrepreneur gets paid while they sleep. They build a business bigger than themselves, and she gets paid even if she is not there”
Right. That’s clear. I want to be an Entrepreneur. So how do I avoid, in effect, to be a Freelancer?
Now the difficulty is that when you start a consulting company like me, in a more or less bootleg fashion, you effectively start as a Freelancer. I am right now preparing to start my company, discussing some potential contracts: at the beginning, people hire you because they know you and what value you can bring to their organization. They would even like to get 100% of your time and attention! Yet, I definitely want to build a real consulting company with a brand, products, scalable activity, leveraging on the different talents of people working in an organization. So, at some stage I definitely want to transform as an Entrepreneur.
what's moving in there?
I have chosen to be an Entrepreneur. Yet, I now know I will need to go through the stage of the Freelancer and resist the temptation to stay in the relative comfort of the situation to move further.
That’s not going to be easy. It will require relentlessly working on the brand and on designing scalable products. Effective scalability will ultimately be the test of entrepreneurship.
There is a gap between Employee and Freelancer. It is mainly a psychological gap; I am right now going through it and it is not fun every day (see the post “Beyond Fear“). There is still another between Freelancer and Entrepreneur. It is a scalability gap. It will also not be easy.
I have decided that instead of dealing with everything at the same time, it is probably better to tackle these two gaps one after the other. That’s what I have decided to do – so I’ll look for Freelancer-type projects in the first six months, keeping them less than full-time – keeping in mind that the ultimate goal is that of an Entrepreneur.
If you follow the news, you might have heard about this groundbreaking study by Facebook about how people are connected.
For a long time, there was the 6 degree of separation theory: anybody could be connected to anybody else through 5 other people who know each other. Interestingly, because testing this hypothesis was cumbersome in the pre-internet world, only one study was done, on a limited sample, in the 1960’s, which grossly confirmed the theory. (Upon closer study, this experiment also showed that some rare people have a much more far-reaching network than others and that they played a critical role in establishing the connection).
Today, as a large proportion of Humankind is on Facebook, our connectivity can be measured on the internet. The result is given in this Facebook report. The following curve is extracted from the report.
degrees of separation on Facebook
It shows that for the entire Facebook there are only roughly on average 4 intermediate people between any 2 individuals on Earth. The friend of your friend knows the friend of the friend of anyone else! Even more shocking, when looking at a particular country like the USA, only 3 intermediaries are necessary.
In addition these curves show that with an increased connectivity in the virtual world, with more and more people on social networks, we grow to be closer and closer to each other; each year we need less and less intermediaries to connect to anybody else. The world is shrinking in front of our eyes!
Let’s not forget that probably the same phenomenon is at work that was observed in earlier experiments: some particularly well connected individuals, few in numbers, are probably those through which most connections could be established. Still, right now, we just discovered that the world is much smaller than we thought.
As I start to be well connected on social networks I discover how I reconnect to people I lost track of, and how I manage to connect to really great, interesting people.
The world is shrinking rapidly. Don’t waste the opportunity! Join the Fourth Revolution!
Right now, as you know, I’m in for a deep change, that needs to be accompanied – and even preceded – by a deep identity change. I have to change my identity from a nice, process-abiding corporate executive to that of a daring, weird entrepreneur.
changing identity
It is funny and interesting to observe how social networks accompany the change. Whenever I push “publish” on a change of my profile on LinkedIn, or on an update on my personal website, that’s where I realize that I am deeply changing my identity. To the public I am now someone else! As I am publishing this new title, this new life, this new identity, I also need to consistently change it myself in my day-to-day behavior and how I view my surroundings. Having changed online, I must change in the real world.
In my case, the usage of social networks accelerates my identity change rather than slows it down. Maybe it is because my online identity was already much closer to the daring entrepreneur than to the nice discrete corporate executive.
For some people it might be more difficult to change their identity suddenly. Facebook will forever remember what you said a few years ago. What if it is contradicting? Worst come to worst, change identity online. Create a new self. And publish you new YOU.
By publishing easily to the world, by taking the entire world as a witness of what we are doing, social networks have the power to accelerate our identity changes. When will you use that power to change your life?
As we are getting close to the end of the year, time for the festive season and for the period of deciding good resolutions for 2012, I want to make sure that you get the opportunity to read the Fourth Revolution book: understand the main drivers of the world’s transformation to be successful and thriving tomorrow. And act and change accordingly!!
Fourth Revolution book (Kindle version)
Because it is important that you be successful, the Fourth Revolution book’s Kindle version is being sold temporarily at the astonishingly low price of 3.99$ or 2.98 euros*. Think about the value you’ll get to understand the world at this price!
This promotion will not last long. Get your copy today from Amazon’s Kindle store!
We can change. We should change. But we can’t change against our identity.
We can’t change against this identity which we have developed, voluntarily or involuntarily, over the years.
Looking at one's identity
This identity, which currently defines ourselves in society. This identity, which we like or not, which sticks to us.
It is extremely hard to try to change against our identity. The effort is tremendous, because we not only fight against ourselves, we fight against our environment, which does not understand why suddenly we take actions that do not fit with our identity.
For successful, profound changes; for easier deep change, there is only one solution. Change your identity first. Change that reflection of yourself. Step out of the conventional identity associated with your career, evolve and create your new identity.
Then, only, change.
How can you do that? There is an extreme solution: travel 10,000km away in the middle of people who don’t know you, or engage yourself in the Foreign Legion, and create a new identity. That’s a bit extreme and time consuming. A softer solution is to start progressively shaping a new identity by engaging in some less conventional practices, and evolving the type of people you mingle with.
We all crave for change but not a lot of us succeed. Start by modifying your identity to prepare for your fundamental change. When do you start?
As the Fourth Revolution Blog starts to foster discussions, we have migrated the comments system to Disqus to make it easier to have meaningful discussions.
By registering on Disqus.com you can follow your comments on all blog posts, like or dislike, and in general, create easily a conversation.
I expect that we’ll have a lot of thoughtful conversations in the near future!
It does not happen too often to me, but right now I am upset that statistics are being misinterpreted.
In these times of crisis, of 99 percent movement, of demonstrations against the financial and corporate world, numerous charts are disseminated that show how the proportion of wages in percent of GDP is declining (and how the proportion of corporate profits is increasing). Here is an example from a recent post on the Daily Beast titled “the era of corporate profit”:
typical historical curves for wages and corporate profit
Now, what does that really show? Obviously, it shows that the proportion in the GDP of the wages and salary income of people employed traditionally by corporations is decreasing. Does it show that the average worker earns less? That’s quite a stretched interpretation even if most commentators just mean it!
As an avid reader of the Fourth Revolution blog, the fact that the share of salaries in the overall income should not surprise you: salaried employment by large corporations is a model of the Industrial Age, which is declining – BECAUSE THERE ARE LESS PEOPLE THAT ARE SALARIED (and not, because each of them gets less money!!). In fact, the diminution of the share of conventional salaries in the GDP is another precursor of the Fourth Revolution!
The US Bureau of Economic Analysis provides historical tables on the revenues in the USA. Here is a curve anyone can obtain with a little bit of patience:
why wages and salaries are only a small part of people's income
So what? Yes, wages and salaries have a tendency to decrease, but the income from non corporate business, sole proprietorships, and non-profits organizations increase dramatically. These are organizations which certainly create value for only a few individuals (to obtain the curve we have reclassified their profits as income for the owners)! These are the organizations of the K.E.E.Ns…
Stop the fallacy of showing decreasing salary curves as an indication of the impoverishment of the average citizen. The future lies in other forms of organizations, and their importance increases dramatically.
Welcome to the Fourth Revolution. The future and the Value is elsewhere than salaried employment. When do you jump to other forms of organization?
Basically, a twitter or facebook post lifespan (in terms of viewing, clicking, re-tweeting etc) is a mere matter of minutes. Only Youtube videos have a lifespan of a few hours.
Is that really true? All this information is staying somewhere. The information is still there, more or less accessible, but searchable. Even where we thought his information was not accessible, it can come back: Facebook is right now digging the information out for its timeline; tweets can be searched. Beyond the flurry of the initial re-tweets and sharing, a long tail of search results and clicks still keeps the information alive.
This is the paradox of modern data on the internet. The flow of information is so immense that our attention span becomes ever shorter. Yet, the information remains there, accessible, searchable, available for us to build upon it. More and more information from more and more contributors, worldwide.
And those will be successful in the Collaborative Age who, beyond the instantaneous, will know how to dig the heap of historical information for the nuggets they are looking for. That’s certainly a K.E.E.N. skill. How often do you dig deeper for more information instead of letting yourself be overwhelmed by the present notifications? Just do it more often!
