It is very powerful. And simple. Feedforward is the contrary to feedback. Instead of looking backwards in the past to uncover what could have been done better, feedforward is used to look into the future and give advice and opinion about how to make something work well.
Feedforward works very well at the beginning of a project, or with someone you don’t know. Explain the project, the intent. Ask the person to give a feedforward, an advice of what to do / how to make it successful / how to improve. Listen intently. And don’t debate. Just note and say thank you.
You would not believe how powerful feedforward can be. Try it this week at the first occasion!
The idea is dead simple but only the Fourth Revolution would allow it. Based on Google’s now huge and unprecendented database of scanned books, researchers have setup a tool that looks for the frequency of words depending on the date of publication.
The 5 million of books they use as a basis is quite a representative sample (4%) of the 129 million books ever published.
Not only that, but the tool is available online at http://books.google.com/ngrams, an interactive tool that lets you test your own words or combination of words, and look at how they evolve over time. I can testify that you can spend some time playing with it (and that’s an understatement). I just put here three examples I have done myself – all graphs range from 1800 to 2008
In the first example, using the frequency of the words “farmer”, “worker”, “employee”, “servant” and “slave”, we see how the concept of servant (yellow) disappears over time, while “workers” (red) and “employees” (green) are newer concepts.
n-gram from servant to employee
In the second example, with the words “spiritual”, “intellectual” and “emotional”, we see how the frequency of “spiritual” diminishes after 1860, while “emotional” is quite a new word growing through the 20th century.
n-gram from spiritual to emotional
In the third example, we just watch the Fourth Revolution ignite, with the words “collaborative” and “networking”:
collaborative networking chart
The incredible thing is that you can yourself do your own research, because the data from the 5 million books (approximately 500 billion words!!) is there, at the reach of your mouse, anywhere in the world.
I write about the Fourth Revolution but that does not mean I am not WOW’d by it regularly. WOW! Try it yourself on Google n-grams interactive site. And watch – the more this tool will become known, the more people will use its graphs to illustrate historical tendencies. Private people will do their own research. Humankind’s collective cognitive capability will be unleashed.
What a better illustration of the Fourth Revolution? This would have just been impossible 2 years ago. WOW.
As the Fourth Revolution grows and spreads, giving up control is inevitable.
Leaders cannot any more control everything that is being done in the organization. Organizations cannot control any more their market as they used to do (for example, spending millions on advertising and measuring a constant return on investment)…
Charlene Li mentions the 3 levers of change – the 3 levers of the Fourth Revolution, pushing unavoidable change:
there are more and more people online
social networking sites usage is becoming extremely widespread
sharing is a rising habit
To that we need to add that with mobile technologies, employees stay connected to their own virtual world even when they are in office.
Do you want your organization to create more value? So, give up control! Stop barring access to social networks in the office! Real valuable work is anyway today not any more just dumb repetitive production, it is Creative, Emotional Work. Just allow it.
I highly recommend ‘Open Leadership’ by Charlene Li. The book is about how social technology transforms leadership in organizations.
open leadership, by Charlene Li
She tackles many issues we have already discussed in this blog, and she provides a number of practical examples that are really enlightening. What’s really good about the book, actually, is how practical it is, and how she shows the struggles of executives with a more open leadership style.
She also provides practical way forward, showing how social network strategy needs to be aligned with the organization’s strategy. It is possible to embrace social networks within pre-defined limits. She shows how to define and enforce these limits, and how to take advantage of the value of the Fourth Revolution while minimizing risk – personal, and for the organization.
We will discuss some striking ideas particularly in some following posts. Today let’s reflect on this quote
“Open leadership is how leaders must let go to succeed”
That’s real. It is about how to let go old-fashioned control to influence the organization at a higher level. Letting go is hard. Let’s help our leaders understand that they have to let go. Or they will get run over by the Fourth Revolution’s speeding train.
When do you let go of your old all-controlling-closed leadership style?
What can we learn from this example on the conditions for this to happen?
Here are 6 key conditions:
have a large enough community because the percentage of people that are going to involve themselves deeply is small (the minimum size of the community depends on their initial level of engagement, but is at least a few thousand members). That might take some time to build up, which means giving out for some time as an investment; and any pre-existing network is clearly an asset;
make sure the community has an emotional engagement into the topic (due to personal or family history, the particular topic, or make the medium addictive in itself), and that the topic has a lot of meaning to them – aligned with their self-purpose;
allow the community members to communicate with each other transversely;
offer recognition to great community members contributions (not only external recognition: internal recognition inside the community is also appropriate); even better, allow community people to rate each other’s contributions;
interact with the community by responding in a reactive manner to issues and questions so as not to lest unwanted issues fester;
provide regularly challenging, unconventional problems that tie with the sense of meaning of the community.
Do the community network that you hope to leverage follow these 6 guidelines? What can you do today to improve the health of your network and benefit from the Fourth Revolution value?
By crowdsourcing the search for the best 3-D molecular configuration they were able to get the help and support from a large community. By making it like a game, they leveraged an emotional appeal to the effort. And they solved a previously unsolvable problem in only 10 days!
This example is particularly noteworthy because anyone – no need to have any knowledge in molecular physics – can play the game. But don’t believe it is an isolated case. Such competitions and game are spreading through all disciplines now, to leverage contribution from anywhere in the world.
What is always amazing, though, is that at the end, the number of really dedicated, passionate contributors is always very small – no more than a dozen or a few dozen. But because the tools attracts talent from around the world, the best suitable, available people are there. And from their kitchen, stay-at-home moms can contribute to the progress of science.
Also noteworthy in the article is how the final discovery built on top of the progress made by other members, and how the small community of dedicated hard-core members is deeply in conversation. The lone genius concept is definitely obsolete.
Welcome to social community-based science.
Welcome to the Fourth Revolution’s value and knowledge production system.
It shows how experiments are now following each other, more and more frequently, that allow small amounts of money to change hands, without the intermediary of a large organization (and its bureaucracy, risk-adversity, etc). Just because the Fourth Revolution provides us with unprecedented human interaction capability.
Will crowdfunding overtake the Industrial Age conventional financial institutions? For the moment it is rather complementary, a small scale solution to small scale problems that are overlooked by conventional institutions. Still, crowdfunding will become very important for many people. This is only the start!
Crowdfunding adds a layer of possibility on top of the existing institutions. That is what will happen with many of our usual institutions as the Fourth Revolution expands. Looking forward to the crowd-institutions!
The point is, having choices or no is always subjective.
We often feel stuck, without choices, constrained.
That’s just a perception, a cognitive bias. More and more, choices are there, around us, multiple. They have been multiplied through the Fourth Revolution: for example, stay-at-home moms can create thriving businesses from their home through the internet!
We often can’t see our choices. But they are there. Do the exercise. Think out of the box, find 5 choices for your life you did not think about.
PS: on the photo, which way do you go? Myself, I won’t go left or right. Maybe straight in the middle. Or turn at a right angle from the trodden path. See. There are more choices than it seems!
While many still believe that Manufacturing (or Industry) is key to value creation, it is very obvious that since the 1980’s, Services have gained preeminence in the economic world.
Moreover, more and more people do not appear in these statistics now, because they are ‘self-employed’! Which is definitely a global trend nowadays.
Even more striking is this graph from the Fourth Revolution book: it shows the composition of the top 100 companies in the US over time. What do we observe? Suddenly from 1985 onwards, Service companies have become the vast majority of the biggest companies.
How Services have taken over from Manufacturing in 20 years
This is identified in the book as one of the precursors of the Fourth Revolution. Value has shifted dramatically. Manufacturing will become like Agriculture: necessary, but a small part of the economical value creation.
That might be hard to understand if you’re borne before 1970-75. Change your mindset. Value is not any more in manufacturing nowadays. And Apple recently overtook Exxon as the largest stock valuation in the world.
The Fourth Revolution is here. Today, value is created overwhelmingly elsewhere than in Manufacturing.
Let’s generalize: the Fourth Revolution is starting to deeply impact our physical environment. The ubiquity of digital communication will deeply change our home environment, but also our usual urban environment (soon to come: urban furniture like bus stops that will communicate with your mobile phone, and advertisement postings that recognize you).
That is going to be destabilizing, there will be trials and errors. Still, one thing is sure: our physical environment is going to be very different in say – 20 years time. Take some pictures today to remember how it was like!
“The Fourth Revolution is here. Such a deep transformation of the world has happened only three times before in Humankind’s 100,000 years’ history. Cheap, long distance, interactive communication unleashes the potential of Humankind. The Fourth Revolution will completely change our society, our organizations, our mindsets. In “The Fourth Revolution“, Jeremie Averous gives us the keys to this world transformation. A visionary guidebook to the world of today and tomorrow”
– Patrick Snow, International Best-Selling Author of Creating Your Own Destiny and The Affluent Entrepreneur
So, still don’t know what the Fourth Revolution is? Buy the Fourth Revolution book today and discover by yourself what it means to you, to us, to the world!
Look closely at this picture, taken in a street of a developed country, and so typical of today’s crisis:
a 2011 crisis queue
What are people queuing for?
Maybe their bank went broke and they queue, hoping to save their last pennies.
Maybe they don’t have anything to eat, and they wait for some food to be given away?
Maybe they don’t have a job, and they wait patiently in front of the local job office?
Sorry – none of this. This is what they wait for:
the real 2011 crisis!
They wait for the new iPhone. They wait for the new communication tools which, behind the scenes, reshapes our world.
The Fourth Revolution is a Revolution. Institutions and society will change. Arab countries revolt, helped by modern communication technology. The foundations of our industry and financial system are shaken by the changes in the value chain. What was worthwhile yesterday will not be valued tomorrow; what was mainstream yesterday might be unethical tomorrow.
The world readjusts to the Fourth Revolution. Schumpeter’s “creative destruction” is happening right under our eyes. The foundations of the Industrial Revolution are shaken. Silently, behind the scenes, a new world is being shaped by visionaries, Steve Jobs and others. An other world. The Collaborative Age.
