Category: Change

How Easily Groups Can Create Language Barriers and Why They Need to Be Overcome

Building on our previous post ‘How Each Social Group Has Its Own Vernacular Tongue‘, it is astounding how groups can quickly create language barriers with the outside world. It creates a sense of identity. In her post ‘You say Tomato, I say Tomato… When Language is the Enemy‘, Valeria Maltoni explains how that can create difficult situations.

The solution is to make sure people agree on the meaning of words and acronyms, and try to get the group to explain its activities to an outsider, preferably a client. “Lack of a common language impacts a common understanding of values and culture. When nobody is on the same page, the context shifts based on where you are.”

“A common language is key to creating the environment that delivers consistent experiences“. Creating this common language is often the first task of a consulting project, or an entity integration project. Let’s not be impressed by the language barrier, we all know how to learn foreign languages. It comes quickly!

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How You Should Embrace Backlash

In the Quartz post ‘The most successful activists don’t fight backlash, they embrace it‘, the author explains how activists of such causes as gay, immigration climate change etc do in fact embrace resistance to progress their cause.

Of course when there is change, there is resistance: “Where there are revolutions, protests, and massive legislative changes, there is always backlash. Sometimes this backlash is more powerful and influential than the initial change itself. Even simple acts of persuasion are readily met with a counterargument. Whether the interactions are big or small, humans are conditioned to fight back.”

However, “this doesn’t mean that progress is unattainable. Accepting backlash as inevitable can be a powerful way of conducting advocacy because it allows you to take control of the narrative and steer it towards your goals. There are two ways to embrace backlash and leverage it for change. Stoke it, or repurpose it.”. Stoking backlash means heightening the opposition getting your group united in opposing the resistance; re-purposing the backlash means playing with its expression form to create an opposite result.

It is good to meet resistance: it means we are actually achieving to move something. And embracing backlash and resistance is the way to progress, instead of opposing straight up. Would you find situations where the force should come from your opponent?

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How Persuading Ourselves to Do Something Might Take the Longest

Seth Godin in his blog post ‘But why does it take so long?‘ makes the point that the time-frame to achieve various objectives can be very different. And that physical factors are not the limit when it comes to creative work: it is coordinating, persuading, pathfinding. Moreover, that what may take the longest of all is persuading ourselves to go for it.

I find this statement quite to the point: it is true that what often takes the longest in all projects is the decision to go for it. Self-persuasion is a major hindrance. Even more so when we have to persuade ourselves against the opinion of our environment.

The total time to achieve a project is thus too often driven by the time we need to persuade ourselves to go for it. Isn’t that a major issue in a world where projects need to be developed always quicker before they become obsolete? There is a pressure and a benefit to those that can persuade themselves quicker that it is worth trying the project.

This statement gives quite a useful insight on some critical success factors in today’s world. Let’s take less time to persuade ourselves before we go for it. Maybe experiment more at small scale before going for it at a large scale.. which beings us back to the lean startup and other considerations that aim at lowering the barrier for action.

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How to Find Peacefulness in the Midst of Chaos Without Escaping

In his post ‘A Life of Peacefulness‘, Leo Babauta makes an extremely interesting point: when faced with chaos and stress, our first reaction may be some kind of escapism (I am myself guilty of it, sometimes). What we should do though is to learn how to remain peaceful in this environment.

I quite like the list all the different types of escapism he mentions, like:

  • “Try to get our world in order, trying to control everything
  • Hide from all the things we do, try not to think about it all
  • Complain about it, about the burden of it all
  • etc.“

And I could certainly add more to the list. Whether real escape and flight, or only in our mind, it is true that we tend to escape difficult situation in one way or the other.

The revolutionary approach he mentions of instead trying to be internally peaceful in the midst of the storm is an interesting one, although certainly quite tough to achieve. He proposes 3 steps:

  • Face the difficulty
  • Open & Relax
  • Take the next step, in peace

How about trying to apply this framework to your current chaos?

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How to Tweak Our Inner Story to Create Personal Change

Following up on our previous post ‘How to Use Stories To Create Change‘, let’s apply the same principle to internal change, focusing on our inner story.

We all have inner stories we like to tell ourselves. Sometimes these are rosy stories presenting events from a way that protects us or puts a positive spin to what happens to us; sometimes they are stories that relate to the identity we’d like to have. Inner stories are very emotionally loaded.

If we want to change, we need to change our inner stories first. By changing our inner stories we change our inner chatter and we change how we respond to events. We might even change our sense of identity. If we try to change without changing our inner stories, we will fail.

Change your inner stories to achieve real, lasting personal change.

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How to Use Stories To Create Change

Valeria Maltoni reminds us in her post ‘The Commercial Power of Story‘ how stories can be powerful agents of change. She applies it in the field of marketing, advertising and commercial success – however, this is of course quite applicable to change management in general.

I find that people do really underestimate the power of stories.

“The language of story connects our identity, what we value, with our goals, where we want to go.

This connection between who we are and what we want explains why we pay attention to stories with emotional appeal.”

The key here is the emotional content of the story, how we can related to certain characters or situations.

When implementing change, think about storytelling as a powerful change tool. It really works.

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Five Conditions for Large Organisations to Develop Innovation Through Acquisition

Large companies seem to be considerably advantaged when it comes to innovation thanks to their unlimited resources to buy and bond together smaller organisations and startups. However this can often be a mirage.

In the past months I have been involved as a creator of small companies, as Business Angel for startups, and also with very large companies in strategic reviews to develop new businesses. Large companies have the great advantage of unlimited resources (at the scale of startups or small companies) when it comes to put together a new business through multiple acquisitions. However at the same time they are probably not the best soil for new ideas (refer the previous post on ‘How Large Should Creative Organisations Be?‘).

Keeping innovation sprouting in a large companies trying to develop a new business by acquisition requires:

  • First, a relative isolation of the innovative branch from the rest of the business and its bureaucracy. It needs to remain independent and enabled,
  • A certain level of stress to be maintained, otherwise, as I have observed, confort and overhead will grow tremendously without real commercial development.The unlimited resources and cash is a great advantage to develop new businesses; at the same time it can be a bit too confortable,
  • An industrial logic to the shopping spree around a driving idea that makes sense,
  • Keeping competition for the services offered by the innovative branch to the original business to detect new offerings and competitors,
  • Exchanges of personnel between the historical activity and the new activity to produce progressively an understanding; however this must be carefully limited and people from the original organisation carefully vetted for their adequacy.

Developing a new activity by acquisition in a large organisation is no easy fit. It requires a lot of management attention. The ‘ugly duckling’ syndrome is never far. Apply those principles to overcome the issue. Any additional idea?

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How Manufacturing Jobs Won’t Come Back, and We’d Better Look into Collaborative Age Occupations

There is an increasing number of papers, particularly in the US, on the fact that developed countries lose manufacturing jobs due to globalisation and trade rather than automation, such as this Quartz paper ‘The epic mistake about manufacturing that’s cost Americans millions of jobs‘. This is particularly trendy, of course, in view of the need to justify Donald Trump stance on the need for protectionism.

My view is that those papers raise an obsolete debate. They are missing the most important point: the economy transforms and the future is not in manufacturing jobs. We’ll never get them back. What’s the point in wishing those jobs to return? Of course in the previous century those were high value added, safe jobs for the middle class. But in the Collaborative Age, manufacturing jobs will become like what farm jobs have become in the Industrial Age: low value jobs.

The economy is changing, fast, and it might look like a “manufacturing job implosion” like the paper says. And this is certainly dramatic for many people. But those jobs won’t come back, even with some backward policies around protectionism. Their value is evaporating. Governments should better help people find new, high value added occupations into the Collaborative Age.

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How Obsolete is Capitalism Really? Can it Really not Address Complexity?

As per his usual perspective, Umair Haque explains ‘Why Capitalism is Obsolete (And Why Humanity’s Future Depends on What’s Next)‘. His view is generally that capitalism is obsolete because it can’t resolve the major issues facing humanity now such as climate change, energy supply etc. And more generally, capitalism would not be able to solve complex issues.

There is some irony in this paper as he takes ITER as an example of why capitalism is obsolete. But ITER is on the contrary quite an example of a centrally planned organisation gone wrong and struggling to deliver.

Anyway, I do not agree with his point on complexity. Capitalism as a way to force change on the economy through innovation still works, and it has easily made centrally planned economies obsolete. There is power in decentralisation and letting innovation compete. And actually capitalism is the best system we have found so far to address the increasing complexity of our world, through its self-regulation loops on some aspects.

It is true that capitalism does not solve the tragedy of the commons or longer term infrastructure issues, because everyone tries to exploit as much as possible of the common resources; and this is why strong regulation on top of capitalism is needed, as well as subsidization of long term commitments. Regulation is also needed to find some balance in society.

We have to find the right balance of regulation and market forces. There will always be some balancing act and the optimised point will need some searching, but I am still confident that regulated capitalism will find solutions to complex issues much faster than any other available system.

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How People Constantly Take Decisions Based on Opinions

In my consulting work I am permanently astonished how much people tend to take decisions based on opinions without even taking a few hours to establish some quick facts about the situation.

Of course we all know that at the end we tend to take decisions based on our feelings, and that over-analysis is not good. However in the professional field it is astonishing to see how many substantial decisions impacting many people are taken with limited analysis or basic fact checking about orders of magnitude. A common example in my speciality is project scheduling, and scheduling forecast. It is quite easy to establish the current slippage of a schedule and the current productivity level compared to the expectations. Decision-makers do not even take a few minutes to establish those facts.

As a consultant a substantial part of my job is to establish some of those facts to question the worldview of decision-makers. And by doing that I am often disturbing because I often invalidate well established opinions. Up to the point that I often need backing by top management for those exercises.

Please take a few minutes to gather some basic facts and orders of magnitude before taking decisions. It would so greatly improve a number of situations. It is astonishing how many bad decisions are taken without basic fact-checking.

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How the Hard Part is Falling Out of Love with the Old Idea

I love this Seth Godin post ‘Falling Out‘: “The hard part isn’t coming up with a new idea. The hard part is falling out of love with the old idea”

In my life as an entrepreneur I encounter or devise more ideas than I can execute. This is often the case in private life as well. The key issue is when one decides to develop some new idea, how to let older activities fall?

I am quite guilty of adding up new ideas and activities without removing older ones, leading to situations of excess work. I then have to do a pruning exercise to concentrate on what is the most important at the time.

I thus fully agree that the hardest is often to stop doing older ideas and objectives, and dropping former objectives. And I also need to improve on this!

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How Creativity Can be Enhanced by Machines

Of course for centuries, creative endeavors have had a renewal every time a new technique appeared. Now with the advent of Artificial Intelligence and machines, artists have another transforming way to be creative. The excellent article ‘The Coming Creativity Explosion Belongs to the Machines‘ gives a broad overview.

“In a process similar to that followed by a human artist or scientist, a creative machine begins its work by framing a problem. Next, its software specifies the requirements the solution should have before generating “answers” in the form of original designs, patterns, or some other form of output. Although the notion of machine creativity sounds a bit like science fiction, the basic concept is one that has been slowly developing for decades.”

This evolution of course may be found threatening by some. In reality we need to get accustomed to the potential for this support to our work and find ways to deploy machine creativity for our benefit. We need to learn how to harness the power of those machines. I can’t wait to see what will come out of those new creativity techniques!

“I suspect the real world-changing application of machine creativity will be in the realm of everyday problem solving, or Little C. The mainstream emergence of powerful problem-solving tools will help people create abundance where there was once scarcity.“

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