Category: Career in the Collaborative Age

The Intrinsic Long Tail of Online Education Graduation Statistics

With the Fourth Revolution comes this new challenge to traditional universities: online courses and degrees. We have mentioned this transformation in the posts ‘online universities are becoming mainstream!‘ and ‘Another institution under siege from the Fourth Revolution: Universities‘.

online-coursesIn this excellent article in Fast Company, an interesting statistic become apparent. “As Thrun [the founder of Udacity] was being praised by Friedman, and pretty much everyone else, for having attracted a stunning number of students–1.6 million to date–he was obsessing over a data point that was rarely mentioned in the breathless accounts about the power of new forms of free online education: the shockingly low number of students who actually finish the classes, which is fewer than 10%. Not all of those people received a passing grade, either, meaning that for every 100 pupils who enrolled in a free course, something like five actually learned the topic. If this was an education revolution, it was a disturbingly uneven one.” Further, “a recent study found that only 7% of students in this type of class actually make it to the end. (This is even worse than for-profit colleges such as the University of Phoenix, which graduates 17% of its full-time online students, according to the Department of Education.)“.

Online education does mean effort, and there is probably some kind of long tail effect at work here: not all of those that say they intend to go for the course will go for it at the end, as it entails a significant commitment. This number should not be a surprise; and as the number of online registered students will increase dramatically, even if the percentage of those that graduate remains small, the number of people who will have benefited will still remain large – and above all, anybody, anywhere in the world, can now take the opportunity. People will simply drop out by themselves if they don’t show the necessary commitment.

The low number of graduates is not a limit of the system, it is but an intrinsic long tail effect. It does not mean failure; the sheer number of graduates does mean success of online education.

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How Holacracy responds to the challenges of the Fourth Revolution organization

Breaking news in January: Zappos, the famous online shoe store, gets away from traditional management organization to embrace Holacracy, a new organizational model without middle managers! This experiment is noted in many press articles as an experimental transformation.

holacracylogoHolacracy is an organizational framework for organizations with a strong purpose and that can be described as working in loose project teams, with distributed authority. This new experiment will be very interesting to follow, as Zappos has already a very strong, decentralized company culture that might make this model successful in that particular context. Read (or at least consider) the (very long and comprehensive) constitution of holacracy!

What is extremely interesting is how many companies do experiment more and more with new organizational models that promote self-responsibility of the employees and encourage creativity. At the same time, these models get rid of the middle-class of intermediate management, or at least sort-of (in holacracy there are still some people more in charge than others apparently: ‘partners’, ‘lead links’, ‘core members’, but it is not linked to direct power and authority).

Let’s observe this experiment and learn further how the organizations will change in the Collaborative Age!

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If You’re not Scared a Lot You’re Not Doing Very Much

This is a quote from Robin Sharma. I feel it is true – although one can debate the “a lot”. There is probably a limit to fear beyond which it becomes improductive.

FEAR - False Evidence Appearing RealAnyway, the truth holds that if you are not scared enough, you probably are not sufficiently outside of your comfort zone. Pushing further the approach, Robin Sharma continue: “Your excuses are nothing more than the lies your fears have sold you“.

When you’ll start doing something that counts, your environment will resist and you will feel, dee within you, that feeling of fear. That’s fine. It means you are starting to move things.

As one of our grand masters said, “Named must your fear be before banish it you can” (Yoda). Name your fear. Look in its face. Defy it. Acknowledge it.

And then move on. Continue what you have been doing.

How scared are you today? If you are too comfortable, it is time to change things around here. When do you start?

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Wish More Luck? Go and Meet People!

“If you never meet anybody you won’t have Luck” says Philippe Gabilliet, an eclectic French business school professor who lately specialized about researching about luck.

You-Make-Your-Own-LuckHis point is that luck is a choice; and that luck is created, or triggered, through more or less random meetings with other people. If you don’t go out and meet other people, you won’t have any luck. Ever.

Think about how powerful this assertion actually is. Luck created by encounters – just like creativity.

Isn’t luck some form or some result of creativity?

Anyway, don’t stay stuck in your comfort zone of people. Go out and meet others – as many as you can. And you will create tremendous luck for yourself. Ready to start?

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How to Overcome the Lies we all tell Ourselves

“It turns out that we lie to ourselves about three things: we view ourselves in implausibly positive ways, we think we have far more control over our lives than we actually do, and we believe that the future will be better than the evidence of the present can possibly justify.” – Tom Asacker in a Business of Belief.

self-deceitThis statement has been proven repeatedly by many studies – like for example, studies that show that 90% of the population believe they are better-than-average drivers. We also generally think we have more control on our future than we really have, forgetting how unpredictable external events can shape our lives and change significantly our destinies – as we often discover looking at how our past life unfolded.

The issue is then, how to get people to still take appropriate action and have the right behaviors while their beliefs do not represent reality? How can we overcome these wrong beliefs?

Beyond making sure people become aware that their view of the world is skewed, the only way to move people is to create emotion (same root!) and desire so that these beliefs can be overcome. Rational explanations backed up by statistics won’t work. Create instead those strong emotions related to fear of loss or emotions related to positive expectations. Speaking to the heart, taking into account these wrong beliefs, is the only way to overcome these artifacts of the mind.

When you come across a situation where these lies are visibly expressed and impede proper action by the person, speak to the Heart!

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Why You Should Better be a Big Fish in a Small Bowl

In his latest book David and Goliath, bestseller author Malcolm Gladwell makes a dramatic point about the fact that we’d better be a big fish in a small bowl than a small fish in a large bowl.

fish_jumping_bowlHe expands this thought through the story of people who choose their universities: “We spend a lot of time thinking about the ways that prestige and resources and belonging to elite institution makes us better off. We don’t spend enough time thinking about the ways in which those kinds of advantages limit out options“. And indeed his examples in the book show that people would probably have been better off in smaller, less known institutions than failing (relatively) in large and more elite institutions.

This thought can of course expand to many areas of life beyond education: the organization in which you work, and even the social community groups you join.

I do fully agree with this statement, which is also at the basis of the concept of niche when it comes to entrepreneurship: better be widely recognized in your specific niche than try to get known in a too wide and crowded segment!

When it comes to you, what choices can you make to be a bigger fish in a smaller bowl?

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Why we Need to Become Used to Failing

Following up from our previous post “Why We Should Stop Treating Our Organizations Like Machines“, let us consider for a moment the consequence of looking at organizations like living systems: Darwinian evolution.

frog catches prey
Another victim of natural evolution!

Darwin has shown that progress and adaptation in living systems come from the evolution of species, whereby the most adapted individuals transmit their genes more effectively than others. In actual terms, in nature, there are a lot of fatal failures. Those who don’t make it through their lifecycle can’t reproduce. Many adapted creatures don’t make it either, possibly through tough luck.

Natural evolution is all about lots of failures and only a few successes. It is tough. That is scary thought for our societies and for us as individuals. Yet successful companies of the internet know how to nurture many initiatives even if a majority will turn out to be failures. Many other organizations don’t know how to do that, leading to people not taking initiatives at all.

The only way to be successful in the Collaborative Age is to expect failure, or at least lack of success, in the majority of our endeavors. This requires a significant mind-shift. Are you ready for it?

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Why We Should Stop Treating Our Organizations Like Machines

“These days, a different ideal for organizations is surfacing. We want organizations to be adaptive, flexible, self-renewing, resilient, learning, intelligent – attributes found only in living systems. The tension of our times is that we want our organizations to behave as living systems, but we only know how to treat them as machines” says Margaret Wheatley.

fourmis de feu
Those Amazon basin ants self-organize as floating rafts to survive the periodic tropical inundations. A powerful example of collaborative organization in an unpredictable environment.

This is an absolutely powerful way to expose the tension that increases nowadays between the Industrial Age’s process-driven, “machine-like” organization and the Collaborative Age’s network that serves to produce value.

Comparing the Collaborative organization to a living system is clearly spot on. It is an ecosystem that achieves results through temporary collaboration, creativity through serendipity and random encounters.

Alas, the mechanistic view of organization is still very present. This creates huge waste and low satisfaction of those who participate in these organizations. This tension will increase in the next few years in all traditional organizations until it will resolve either through a crisis or through a transformation.

And you, are you ready to consider organizations as living systems?

Hat tip to Valeria Maltoni for the quote and Robert Branche for the image (on the cover of his new book, “les Radeaux de Feu“).

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Hope is not a strategy. And Uncertainty is your best friend.

I stumbled upon this statement as headers in a post by James Altucher about what he learned being a trader. As a trader and faced continuously by uncertainty and impossibility to predict the future, he learnt some basic wisdom that should help us in today’s even more uncertain environment.

Uncertainty vs certaintyHope is not a strategy: hoping that something will unfold positively in the future, without any underlying indication, is not very useful. It is counterproductive because you won’t be taking any action. Hope is passive.

Uncertainty is your best friend: it might be a bit rock-n-roll but only thanks to uncertainty can we hope to create our space in the world. If everything was certain, our fate would be decided and why would we do any effort? How could we expect to trace our own way? It is up to those who know how to thrive in uncertainty to create change in the world and to create success for themselves.

Drop passive hope and work on better taking advantage of uncertainty. These are key skills in the world today. When do you start?

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How to Overcome the Stockholm Syndrome of Traditional Employment

Following on our blog “What is so Awful About the Disappearance of Hierarchy?“, and the fact that many people feel attached to traditional hierarchical organizations as a kind of comfort anchor, I find that an interesting phenomenon to prompt thinking is the “Stockholm Syndrome”.

stockholm-syndromeThis psychological syndrome appears after hostage-taking situations, where the hostage might have developed a comfort feeling from small attentions the hostage taker might have had for him/ her. In spite of an overall terrible and violent picture of an hostage situation, it happens that a very strong emotional connection develops, where the hostage defends the hostage-taker. The hostage feels like the hostage-taker cares, whereas this is absolutely not the case.

It might be a stretch, but would it not be a similar case regarding the attachment of many people to traditional, hierarchical organizations? Employees are the first to complain loudly how they feel mistreated, poorly recognized, and how work is a burden; and at the same time, presented with alternative types of organization, they defend the traditional hierarchy because of the comfort provided and the small attentions given from time to time (gifts, bonuses and other recognition material).

We know when we are taken hostage in everyday life when we feel vulnerable, powerless and at the mercy of other people. Don’t let it happen to you even within normal employment: find your freedom space, including financially, and don’t feel at the mercy of your employer. And avoid absolutely the Stockholm syndrome!

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How to Push Ourselves Hard – and Not Break

In our previous post ‘How Courage Is a Skill and How It Can Be Developed‘ we explained that courage can be developed through exercise; and one of these is to expose oneself progressively to harder and tougher situations.

Stretch yourselfAs a health reminder it is important to know how to stretch oneself without over-stretching to the point of rupture or to the point of becoming hurt.

Christopher Penn says it well in this post about his experience in the field of martial arts:
“That’s the danger of a lot of the “self-actualization” advice being given. It’s conceptually reasonable advice – shoot for your dreams – but the uncomfortable truth is that many of us, myself included, don’t always have a realistic perception of where we actually are with our skills, with our capabilities, with our resources. We can believe we have abilities or resources we don’t actually have, and when we try to make our leap, we fall far short of where we believe we should be.”

“So how do you benchmark yourself? You put yourself in adverse conditions that are reasonably safe and you work on breaking your delusions until you know where you are. The easiest way to do that is to try with a reasonably low risk project that forces you to put all your skills to the test.”

It is important to stretch oneself outside one’s comfort zone, and it is also important not to over-stretch so as to avoid to get hurt. The only way is to test the limits and know where to pause for a while. It is only possible to identify this limit by trial and error – and most importantly, by staying conscious of your own reactions, of being aware of your own self.

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So, What is Consulting Really About?

One of the best definitions so far of Consulting is “the art of influencing people at their request. People want some kind of change – or fear some sort of change – so they seek consulting, in one form or the other” – Gerald M. Weinberg.

This looks like a consultant at work!
This looks like a consultant at work!

This probably means that a lot of ‘consultants’ probably are not consultants are per this definition – probably better defined by temporary support or project management support. Actual consulting is really about influence and change. On the other hand, many of us are actually consulting in our private or social life without knowing it.

Influencing people at their request requires 1) permission and 2) provocation and support.

Consultants, did you get permission? And then, are you using this permission effectively to provoke and induce change?

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