Author: Jeremie Averous

Overcoming our fear

Failure is free today. But fear is still lurking.

Fear to take the first step into the unknown. Fear to be exposed in the spotlight to the judgment of the crowd. Fear to jump in the unknown.

jump into the unknown
overcome your fear

Overcome the fear. Kill the fear. Ask yourself: what’s the worst that can happen to me if I do this? If I publish my idea? What will my family, boss, friends, colleagues, think about me?

There is just one risk. That they like it because they discover a new facet of your personality.

Go and do it. Lean into our fear.

FEAR is just False Evidence Appearing Real.

Get out of your shell. Contribute to the world. Start today. The first step is the most difficult. Do it.

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Failure is now a free opportunity. Grab it!

In the Industrial Age, failure was expensive. Any activity involved material stuff, capital and sweat. You could not fail too often or you would become broke.

Today in the Collaborative Age, failure is free. All it costs is some effort and learning.

The Fourth Revolution website cost me 10$ to setup – the cost of securing the domain name. All the rest is free including the hosting. It will remain so until I decide that this initiative is worthwhile, well received, and it is worth investing a bit more money in improving the service for its followers.
If the initiative does not work, then I’ll shut it down and the only thing it will have cost me is my time. And actually I will have learned so much from the experiment that that’s more an investment than a cost.

20 years ago, to pass my message across, I would have had to write a book or newspaper article, try to find a kind publisher who would have looked at my background and decided whether he would take the risk.

So, failure is not only free today, but it is an opportunity. We can go quickly through failure cycles, learning in the process until we find the right product, idea, message.

We still don’t embrace systematically free failure because of our Industrial Age mindset. And because of our fear.

We often read about improving a little bit every day so that the compound improvement gets significant.

When will you decide to fail once a day so that the compound investment and opportunity becomes significant?

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How can we hope to understand the Collaborative Age?

We have been raised in the Industrial Age. Our parents lived in the core of the Industrial Age. Our mindset and world-view has been shaped by years and decades of Industrial Age formatting.

Revolutions take often at least one generation to spread, because it involves a drastic mindset change.

Embedded in our Industrial Age conditioning, how can we hope to get a glimpse, understand, the Collaborative world?

Only two approaches are possible.

  • Analyze previous Revolutions to understand typical constants and transformations, and extrapolate to the Fourth Revolution
  • Examine Fourth Revolution precursors and follow their direction towards the Collaborative Age.

The way to understanding the Collaborative Age is hard and dangerous. But it is necessary. Only by anticipating transformations can we thrive through them and find a meaning to the world.

Are you ready to go down the arduous path of trying to understand the Fourth Revolution?

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A short history of human civilization

Human civilization is gone through 3 Revolutions since 100,000 years.

How do we know that there are only 3 Revolutions, and that these Revolutions have really changed the world? That’s easy. Just look at the world population estimates over time.

human population over time
That cannot be more clear. Each Revolution brought a significant change in the value production system. Many more humans could be sustained. Overall population increased by more than 100 times as each Revolution spread over the planet.

Our physical environment got modified by each Revolution: agricultural farmland, industrial and transportation facilities…

The new value production system of the Fourth Revolution will dwarf the Industrial Age production system. It will change our living environment and the world. Are you ready for the transformation?

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The organization’s social network needs to become open to the outside

The Collaborative Age organization will be open to the outside (see a previous blog post: the organization needs to open itself).

Likewise their social network systems need to open to the outside. That’s even less straightforward.

I was just reading Tony Hsieh’s book on Zappos (‘delivering happiness’) and what struck me is how they leveraged a spirit of collaboration with the outside world through their systems to become successful. Indeed they work with their suppliers in a spirit of collaboration and give them access to sales data which would have been the graal of confidential information in Industrial Age organizations. And it works to leverage the commitment and support of the external world. It becomes aligned with the purpose of the organization.

Likewise a great parameter of Amazon’s renewed success is the openness of their website to the comments of readers and authors.

open close button

By opening its systems to the world the organization leverages on the world’s creativity, and avoids creating internal duplicates which are much less deep and responsive.

We don’t know what’s the recipe for opening the right way, at the right time. But experiments like Zappos seems to show that openness should not be feared, as long as the spirit of collaboration is there.

So, when do you open your internal social network to the world?

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For the first time the elite will be nomadic

The elite of the Agricultural and Industrial Ages were sedentary.

The nomad was the enemy. Appearing suddenly from the steppes, the barbarian thirsty for blood, gold, and the amenities of civilization.

Civilization, wealth, value was sedentary.

The K.E.E.N., dominating the Collaborative Age value production system, will move through the world from project to project. He or she will be rootless. The elite will be international.

Today for the first time ever, the dominant elite will be nomadic. The sedentary will not dominate value production.

Are we ready for the change?

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Broadcasting power defined the institution of the Industrial Age

So many institutions of the Industrial Age were defined by their broadcasting power.

They were defined by their specialized journal, their TV channel, their radio station.

Broadcasting was expensive and complicated. It took institutions to do that.

Institutions decided what could be broadcast and what could not be. Institutions decided what was mainstream and what was not. Institutions decided what was good and what was not.

Today, unprecedented long distance interconnectivity bypasses the monopoly of institutions to broadcast information.

Anybody can, for no cost, broadcast to the world.

When will institutions realize that superior broadcasting power is not any more the justification of their existence?

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Chaos theory and your destiny

In the Industrial world, everything was linear and predetermined. The trajectory of a ball. The orbit of the planets.

Your life was determined too – by your childhood experiences and your genes, later converted in the format of a diploma. The past determined the present which determined the future, according to a deterministic process.

We now know that’s not the case. Chaos theory shows that the smallest event can change the future. Psychology shows that one can change her perception of the past.

It is the end of ‘the road to destiny’ reaching the horizon linearly. It is not even being at a crossroad of possible choices. It is not about taking the least used road versus the most.
trail of destiny
Today we are inside a wide space of possibles. We can trace our road in any direction. We don’t need to follow any example.

When do you start tracing your own trail?

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Chaos theory – a deep change in our understanding of the world

Chaos theory is a new finding. It dates back to the 1960’s.

The best known example is the research by Lorenz on predicting the weather. Lorenz found, much to his astonishment, that the result of his computer calculations to predict the future weather could be completely different if minute changes were introduced to the initial values. He only used some basic laws of physics!
This led Lorenz to the famous “butterfly effect’: the flap of a butterfly’s wing in Brazil could foster a tornado in Texas!
butterfly effect chaos

Too bad for Newton and his successors, the world is not any more determined by the application of the laws of nature!

This is a message of hope, because it shows that our future is not determined.

We can make the choice to change and to create a beneficial effect to achieve the future we want.

We can make the choice to give that tiny flap of our wing and create tremendous change to the world.

When do you start your blog? When do you start telling the world what you have deep in yourself? You might create a far-reaching transformation of the world… for the best!

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Quantum physics – A precursor of the Fourth Revolution

Since the beginning of the 20th century we know that Newton’s mechanistic approach is not sufficient to explain everything we can observe.

EinsteinEinstein came out with the Theory of Relativity. Matter is now energy. Light is deviated by mass.

Planck, Heisenberg and others developed quantum physics. Particles are little bit of energy moving in the void. It is not possible to know exactly where they are. Observation changes the reality by reducing the uncertainty.

All revolutions are related to changes in our view of the world, which is expressed in the laws of physics. Newton’s theory, after some time, led to the development of all the machines of the Industrial Age.

Some time is always needed between the definition of new laws of physics and the development of new objects that take advantage of this new knowledge. It takes even more time for philosophers to decipher the consequences for the destiny of humanity.

We are now, after a few decades, surrounded by objects based on the new laws of physics. Laser. CD’s. Computer chips.

We have not yet fully understood what quantum physics means for our destiny.

One thing is sure. Quantum physics is a radical departure from the predictable Newtonian world. It is definitely a precursor of the new Revolution.

Einstein was right to be naughty. He just threw the world upside down.

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Professions are just a type of institution

diploma

“I am an engineer”. “I’m a doctor”. “I’m a teacher”. “I’m a librarian”…

“I have a PhD”. “I have a MBA”…

So many professions defined by a diploma, a degree. Each profession is an institution. You can’t enter it without the right document.

Once established, professions fight for their rights. You need certain qualifications to practice.

Protectionism kicks in. Degrees from other regions, from other countries are not recognized.

Professions are institutions. All those professions, all those degrees have been created during the Industrial Age.

Institutions of the Industrial Age will be significantly changed through the Fourth Revolution.

Professions, as any institution, will resist the Revolution. But they will have to change. They will have to open.

They will change, because a diploma that you get when you are 20 doesn’t say a thing about how useful you will be at 50.

They will open, because people outside established professions start contributing to the world in the area professions thought was their exclusive remit.

The question is not: when will professions open? But rather, whether they will open before being overtaken by the Fourth Revolution.

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