Category: Change

How the AIDS Epidemics Gives Us Pointers as to Behavior Changes Post Covid-19

This interesting article in the Atlantic “How the Pandemic Will End” points an interesting parallel with the AIDS epidemics as to how behaviors changed as a result.

“The rise of HIV and AIDS completely changed sexual behavior among young people who were coming into sexual maturity at the height of the epidemic. The use of condoms became normalized. Testing for STDs became mainstream. Similarly, washing your hands for 20 seconds, a habit that has historically been hard to enshrine even in hospitals, may be one of those behaviors that we become so accustomed to in the course of this outbreak that we don’t think about them.”

We can certainly aspect that certain habits and behaviors related to health and personal hygiene will change. We can for example expect that in western countries, wearing masks in public will probably become mainstream and polite as it is in Asia (as a way to protect others from your microbes). It will become more normal to stay home when we have the flu.

Just as AIDS had a deep and profound impact on the young generation at that time, so we can expect this crisis to have a deep impact on the current younger generation as it will influence their world view for the years to come.

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How Our Worldview Can Change In Days after Years of Stagnation

I like this amusing little post by Tyler Cowen “World 2.0 — “There are decades where nothing happens, and weeks where decades happen”

Just a reminder how our worldview can change in a few days after having remained stuck for years.

Beyond the fun, this serves to remind us that in nature, the main shifts happen in a catastrophic and sudden manner. Hours of flooding will change more the riverbed than years of flowing, earthquakes or volcano eruptions will model the ground more than years of slow shifts… And this is a common characteristics of all complex systems.

A stable world and civilisation is an illusion, and change always happens suddenly. Let’s get up to it.

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How Fast Our Worldview Can Change

One thing I found interesting with the Covid-19 crisis is how quick our worldview can change. I got caught too: one day it seemed quite ludicrous to envisage that we would be submitted to confinement (and the economic consequences of such a decision), and less than one week later it was the most sensible thing to do.

This crisis is not anything that we as humankind should not know how to manage: there have been many before, and there will be many in the future too. Lessons learnt and practices are available. Models of contamination exist. Quarantine as a concept is quite old. For example, in 1918 there were already instructions about how to make individual masks, like today.

And we got caught because we don’t have the individual memory of such an event. The collective memory was not sufficient.

Still we collectively managed to change our worldview, our way of living and working, often in less than a week. And after some adjustment, most of us live through this crisis in a reasonable manner.

We thus seem to remain quite adaptable, individually and collectively, when circumstances so require. And quite fast too. That’s rather good news in the face of the increasing volatile world we will be facing in the next decades.

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How We Now Realize What VUCA Really Means

The VUCA concept has been trendy for a while to describe the modern complex world: Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous. I am not quite sure all of those that used this term really understood what it meant. The Covid-19 pandemics has provided an interesting example and probably a realization for many!

We actually should not be astonished by such events in the modern world. Because of globalisation any such events becomes global much more quickly than before. This crisis will probably go down in history books as one of the fastest spreading crisis throughout the world, where worldviews and appreciation of the situation have changed drastically from one day to the next. Still, there have been such crisis before and there will be in the future. Only, changes happen now much faster and in a more unpredictable manner.

When spirits will get quieter after the crisis, we’ll certainly see that the global economy was ready anyway for a shake-up as it does every decade or so. The Covid-19 was a strong initiator, more so because of the impact of the initial event. New equilibrium will be found for a few years, with probably western democracies weakened compared to Asia. As any catastrophic event, it will lead to a new world stability model – for a while only.

The funny thing is really that the proponents of VUCA got probably overwhelmed too by the violence of the crisis. Welcome to the collaborative age!

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How We Get Always Surprised by Exponential Growth – But We Shouldn’t

The fact that exponential growth is not intuitive has already been discussed several time in this blog (e.g. ‘Why the Fourth Revolution is the Era of the Exponential, and How this Changes Everything‘, or ‘The Exponential and the Black Swan: The Counter-Intuitive World of the Fourth Revolution‘). And this lack of intuitiveness explains much of the hesitations and poor response in the face of the Covid-19 pandemics – by individual as well as politicians.

While news focused on absolute numbers, what was important was the rate of growth per day and whether it abated with confinement measures. The rash absolute rate of increase surprised everyone, just because it is so difficult to apprehend the power of exponential growth.

But that should have been so easy to compute and model. Maybe more difficult to explain to the general public, but how could decision makers get surprised? At some stage the evolution of the pandemic became quite predictable for each region.

The new Collaborative Age is indeed the age of the exponential. Exponential growth of companies and economies, and exponential growth of pandemics and catastrophic events.

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What Physical Changes Systematic Remote Work Will Create

Following up on our previous post, since the pandemic accelerates the transition towards remote work, what are the practical and physical changes we can expect?

First, houses and apartments will have to have a home office, leading to larger surfaces or different arrangements.

The equipment of households in terms of computers and tablets can also be expected to grow to at least one device per person, children included (that’s a big topic just now as schools are closed and children have to work from computers).

Since less people will commute we can expect less tension on public transportation and similar infrastructure (although there will be days where everyone will be expected to meet at the office, so some days in the work week may still be quite busy). Therefore there may be less days with significant traffic jams in large cities. Conversely there will be more tension on the internet infrastructure but that will be easier and cheaper to fix.

We can expect office times to be more like 2 or 3 days per week, letting office spaces being shared between companies or departments.

I am not quite sure there will be a visible impact on flight traffic as personal connections will still remain important and tourism can expect to still develop.

What other physical changes do you think we can we expect from this increase in remote work?

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How the Pandemic Accelerates the Move to Remote Work

The Covid-19 pandemic has really shaken the world. And it has accelerated the move towards virtual remote work. I like this title from Mitch Joel: “It Took A Global Pandemic To Change How We Work“.

While I have been practicing this work mode for years as a global consultant, many more people have found out that it can work provided there is a reasonable organisation at home to allow it. I have many contacts in large companies that discovered this mode of working for the first time, and were obliged to do that for weeks!

I am deeply convinced that in the collaborative age, we’ll still have face-to-face meetings but we will also work increasingly from home or remotely.

The key, I believe, is to know each other physically if possible before starting to collaborate virtually. Although that may not even be fully true as long as there has been some one-to-one personal interaction on an emotional level before, and that can also be through some remote video meetings.

And this will also mean some profound changes in architecture: home offices will become a must and not any more an option.

Welcome to the age of remote work!

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How to Overcome the Dilemma of Getting Stuff Done and still Be Kind to Oneself

The post by Leo Babauta ‘How to Be Kind to Yourself & Still Get Stuff Done‘ resonates much with me, because it is a dilemma I am struggling with on a daily basis. I generally consider that effort is required to get things done, and tend not to be too kin don myself as a result of my drive.

“This is the fear, when people start being kind to themselves — that they’ll be too soft, they won’t get stuff done, they’ll let themselves off the hook too easily, they’ll just lie around doing nothing.”

Leo Babauta reminds us why kindness to self is so important. He often finds “that almost all of our barriers are self-imposed — we are harsh on ourselves, and it makes everything much more difficult“. Having compassion for oneself, and concentrating on doing things that are good for oneself, is the key to overcoming this dilemma.

I like this idea that if one is too hard on oneself, maybe it is also because what we are trying to do may be a bit harmful.

I’ll try to be a bit kinder to myself in the future, while still trying to get stuff done. It’s a good way to focus on what’s good for me too.

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How Heresy May be the Symptom of Innovation

Paul Graham‘s post on ‘Novelty and Heresy‘ is worth reading. as it reminds us that “If you discover something new, there’s a significant chance you’ll be accused of some form of heresy“.

“One common way for a good idea to be non-obvious is for it to be hidden in the shadow of some mistaken assumption that people are very attached to“. This leads to being treated as an heretic.

The point may be to figure out what is that assumption that people are very much attached to. I also tend to believe that this kind of discovery, while it is a risk, is also an opportunity as it opens an understanding of the world that won’t be shared by many people until it will become mainstream – and thus may become a competitive advantage.

Paul Graham suggests to look for heresies to identify truly new ideas. Taboos are possible sources of great innovation or at least a starting point to put in question commonly held assumptions.

And since truths have a half-life, what’s true today may not be true in a few decades therefore heresy today may be mainstream in a few decades too!

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How Scientific Truths Need a Generation of Researchers to Pass Away to Be Overturned

Following on our previous post ‘How Facts and Truths Have a (Short) Half-Life‘ and some insights from the book ‘The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date‘ by Samuel Arbesman, one interesting aspect is to observe how much a usual half-life for scientific ‘truth’. It turns out often to be one generation, or approximately 50 years.

The reason is simple: it takes the mandarins and opinion- and career-making professors to disappear naturally for new ideas to take ground.

“Two Australian surgeons found that half of the facts in that field also become false every forty – five years . As the French scientists noted , all of these results verify the first half of a well – known medical aphorism by John Hughlings Jackson , a British neurologist in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries : “ It takes 50 years to get a wrong idea out of medicine , and 100 years a right one into medicine . ” This means that despite the ever – expanding growth of scientific knowledge , the publication of new articles , refutations of existing theories , the bifurcations of new fields into multiple subfields , and the messy processes of grant – writing and – funding in academia , there are measurable ways in which facts are overturned and our knowledge is ever renewed . I’m not simply extrapolating from this half – life of medicine to argue that all of science is like this . Other studies have been performed about the half – lives of different types of scientific knowledge as well“

So if you are in a field where you uncover a new ‘truth’ but this cannot be heard by whoever is the old guy in charge of your career, either you conform, or you have to go outside the institution and use it for yourself.

With a quicker developing world, this limit of 50 years half-life for scientific truth may become quite a problem! Maybe some age limit on researchers may be a good idea?

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How Connections is Far More Important Than Likes

Valeria Maltoni reminds us in her post ‘There’s no ROI in Likes. The ROI is in Connection‘ that connections are quite more important than social network likes. It’s worth reminding ourselves from time to time!

“You don’t get connection from status. You get it by enlivening each other other, making people stronger through engagement. Status may give you self-esteem, but alone it does not create change“

The post is quite interesting to read as it recounts an actual experiment performed on a social network (LinkedIn).

Indeed change depends on strong connections. Social capital accrues in actual physical networks. Think about how often you have transformed virtual connections to physical connections (in my case, not impossible but quite rare). And the value that can be created by a physical face-to-face in terms of possibilities.

Let’s do more physical connections and less likes!

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How We Need to Overcome the Fear of Unfulfillment of our Lives

In this excellent short post ‘Scared of success?’ the Gapingvoid culture design group addressed the link between fear and achievement. We are fearful to start something new. And when we don’t then we wonder why, and it creates even more fear: to have forego our lives doing nothing worthwhile.

The straightforward issue is that “Out of fear may come comfort, but also out of fear often comes a sense of unfulfillment. You spend your whole life being scared, then wonder why you haven’t created anything“

And I find the next reverse issue even more interesting: “more poignantly, you spend whole life not creating anything, and then you wonder why you’re so scared all the time“

The fear of unfulfillment, of not having lived at the expected level, of not having impressed on the world our talents, whatever they are, may be one of the most fundamental human fears. Let’s not just face it passively, let’s go explore new things and be creative!

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