Category: Change

How Business Control Shifts to Piloting Support in the Collaborative Age

One of the key transformations from the Industrial Age to the Collaborative Age is related to the function of Business Control.

business controlIn Industrial Age organizations, the control function acts as the police that checks that cost is minimized and employees and resources are used at their maximum productivity. It also covers all sorts of fraud prevention. It is by necessity a function kept independent of operational and line managers, reporting to senior management. Traditionally it is a role that concentrates a large part of the data gathering and analysis capability of the organization.

In Collaborative Age organization, a large part of the control function is evolving into a function that is embedded in the business and supports management decision-making on a day-to-day basis. This is the case for example in project management: project control is embedded in the project and its main role is to support the project manager pilot the project to its objectives. That role is not so much control as organizing the gathering of data, checking for its accuracy, analyzing it and devising appropriate forecasts as to the direction taken by the business.

However, the use of the confusing terminology of ‘project control’ is sometimes misinterpreted. It is not the traditional business control role and must actually be kept separate.

While there will still remain some part of actual business control in the older sense, most of the analytical resources of companies are now devoted to support decision-making, through Business Intelligence and other tools. This evolution will be reinforced into the Collaborative Age. And it is important we don’t keep the terminology ‘control’ to describe that function.

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Why We Should Focus On Intentions Rather Than Goals

Leo Babauta at Zen Habits makes the case that we should focus on intentions rather than goals to achieve what we want.

intention“As you might know, I experimented with giving up goals after being very focused on goals for years. It was liberating, and it turns out, you don’t just do nothing if you don’t have a goal. You get up and focus on what you care about. Read more here. Instead, I’ve found it useful to focus less on the destination (goal) and instead focus on what your intention for each activity is. If you’re going to write something … instead of worrying about what the book will be like when you’re done, focus on why you want to write in the first place. If you are doing something out of love or to help others , for example, then you are freed from it needing to turn out a certain way (a goal) and instead can let it turn out however it turns out. I’ve found this way of working and living to be freeing and less prone to anxiety or procrastination.”

It is true that most of the literature is about setting goals and not necessarily about setting intentions. Personally I am still very much into goals. I am aware this approach requires a lot of personal discipline and is sometimes excessively straining. I certainly need to consider setting strong intentions instead!

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How to Set the Conditions to Really Free Ourselves

Pema Chodron writes: “This moving away from comfort and security, this stepping out into what is unknown, uncharted and shaky – that’s called liberation.” Is that really true?

liberationThis idea that to be free we must move away from our comfort zone is quite strong and scary at the same time. It would mean that we can’t find freedom within the comfort of our lives.

The challenge is of course that those religious people who seek liberation tend to enclose themselves in a physical comfort zone made of habits and rituals. Is that possibly to be in a better situation to escape their mental comfort zone? This would seem to be a contradiction.

At the same time it is in times of unknown possibilities that we can find the best opportunities to reveal ourselves. That is often not possible in our comfort zone, unless some events happen that shake it.

It would seem to me that Pema Chodron’s words mean that we need to seek situations that are unknown and unpredictable to reach freedom. Let’s look for them – wherever they are, close or far from our comfort zone!

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How History Forgets That Searching for Truth Entails Risks

“Because biographies of famous scientists tend to edit out their mistakes, we underestimate the degree of risk they were willing to take. And because anything a famous scientist did that wasn’t a mistake has probably now become the conventional wisdom, those choices don’t seem risky either.” writes Paul Graham in an excellent short post, ‘the risk of discovery‘.

newtonalchemy“Biographies of Newton, for example, understandably focus more on physics than alchemy or theology. The impression we get is that his unerring judgment led him straight to truths no one else had noticed. How to explain all the time he spent on alchemy and theology? Well, smart people are often kind of crazy.” (and it seems Newton’s dog helped burn his alchemy writings as well).

There are at least two interesting learning points from this reflection:

  • People who truly seek new truths at the border of knowledge will seem a bit crazy and will investigate potential avenues, some of which might not be fruitful at the end. And they will put in question mainstream knowledge, which can be dangerous for them.
  • History only highlights what is becoming new mainstream knowledge forgetting about the rest, and deleting it from collective memory. But that is reductive because we don’t know what will become mainstream in the future.

So it quite normal that we take risks if we strive to progress science and find new truths. Taking risk is part of it. Let’s not stop at it!

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How We Need to Change Our Formula For Success: the Happiness Advantage

“If you can raise somebody’s level of positivity in the present, then their brain experiences what we now call a happiness advantage, which is your brain at positive performs significantly better than at negative, neutral or stressed. Your intelligence rises, your creativity rises, your energy levels rise.” says Shawn Achor in a lively TED talk.

happiness_productivityThe traditional success formula is broken. “Most companies and schools follow a formula for success, which is this: If I work harder, I’ll be more successful. And if I’m more successful, then I’ll be happier. That undergirds most of our parenting and managing styles, the way that we motivate our behavior. The problem is it’s scientifically broken and backwards”.

In particular, it does not work because “Every time your brain has a success, you just changed the goalpost of what success looked like.” And thus we never reach that success we are striving for.

How much better do we get if we have the happiness advantage? “In fact, we’ve found that every single business outcome improves. Your brain at positive is 31% more productive than your brain at negative, neutral or stressed. You’re 37% better at sales. Doctors are 19 percent faster, more accurate at coming up with the correct diagnosis when positive instead of negative, neutral or stressed“.

Let’s strive to get the happiness advantage and produce success rather than the other way around!

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How Happiness Comes From Within and Not From External Factors

“Your external world can only predict 10% of your long-term happiness. 90 percent of your long-term happiness is predicted not by the external world, but by the way your brain processes the world.” says Shawn Achor in a lively TED talk.

brain_happinessExternal-generated happiness is only temporary and limited. Hardwiring ourselves to be happy relatively irrespective of the circumstances is what creates long term happiness.

It is a long way from the usual understanding of happiness associating happiness with wealth, idleness and the ownership of worldly things.

Let’s train and hardwire our brains to see the world in a more happy manner, and live happier lives!

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How Having a Large Connected Fleet Is an Advantage for Artificial Intelligence

Most artificial intelligence (AI) today is based on machine learning. Hence the more data is available, the better it is to get machines to learn how to react to a wide array of situations.

tesla-autopilotTesla seems to be leading this capability thanks to the fact that their cars are always connected by default. This paper ‘Tesla Tests Self-Driving Functions with Secret Updates to Its Customers’ Cars’ reveals the astonishing capabilities in terms of data retrieval as well as in terms of software update for the car. ““The ability to pull high-resolution data from these vehicles and to update the vehicles over the air is a significant part of what’s allowed us in 18 months to go from very behind the curve to what is today one of the more advanced autonomous or semi-autonomous driving features,” said Sterling Anderson, director of Tesla’s Autopilot program”.

Leadership on the market will thus be on those that will be able to connect the maximum widgets used in the widest conditions possible. And repatriate the data instantaneously.

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How the Industrial Age World Wants to Suck Us Back Into Conformism

I am always astonished at how the Industrial Age conformism is trying to pull us back in its wake, in particular for that that have somewhat escaped.

suit-startupI have been on my own as a consultant and entrepreneur for a full 5 years now. In particular since I have come back to France, I have had a lot of comments along the lines of (I simplify): “poor thing scratching your life on your own and having such a difficult life, I hope you’ll manage to get a decent position in a large company soon“. That was in particular a key component of new year’s wishes this year.

Funny how people at the core of the system can only consider success as being successful in the system with all the bells and whistles and external signs of power that go with it. Funny how people consider that being on one’s own is probably so scary and unbearable. Yes, it is probably much less secure, but it is overall so much more fun.

The Industrial Age institutions and corporations are desperate to bring back in their ranks those escapees that live a different life. Let’s resist!

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How Google is Becoming an AI-centric company

After search-centric companies, and then mobile-centric companies, here come AI-centric companies! Following the trend such as at IBM, The new strategic impetus at Google is the inclusion of Artificial Intelligence in all its services, with dramatic quality improvements.

google_aiThis interesting NYTimes article ‘the Great AI awakening‘ is worth reading. It hightlights in particular the work of a particular division at Google called “Google Brain” with a focus on the usage of neural networks for deep machine learning and outcome quality improvements. According to the paper, in particular for the ‘Translate’ application, “the AI system has demonstrated overnight improvements roughly equal to the total gains the old one had accrued over its entire lifetime” (i.e. since 2006).

The paper also interestingly gives an account of the historical moves that have made machine learning based on neural networks mainstream in the past few years.

Let’s brace for similar improvements in a bunch of similar services that we are increasingly using in our daily life!…

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How Democracy is Adapted to a Complex World

Democracy is the political regime best adapted to complexity. The reason is that it allows bifurcations to happen at every election, i.e. depending on the country every 4 to 7 years. Those changes can be unexpected and worrying, but they happen more frequently and -one hopes- less abruptly than in other political regimes.

trump_win
US election surprise!

Elections are always creating surprises in particular in troubled times, and this has been demonstrated heavily in 2016 where in several western countries there has been a reaction against the establishment and from people who feel left aside from the world’s transformation (Brexit, Trump election).

It is a good property of a system setup to manage a complex world to be able to implement those important changes with this frequency.

Other political regimes will in fact only allow such changes much less frequently and therefore, they will be more abrupt and can even degenerate into civil wars.

We concur heavily with Churchill saying that “democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried“! And this conclusion on democracy should be kept in mind when we are not happy with election results.

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How The Challenge of New Technology Adoption Might Not Be a Challenge After All

One of the main concerns nowadays is the pace at which society can absorb all the technological changes happening.

According to Salim Ismail, Singularity University’s founding executive director and global ambassador  in ‘What Happens If Society Is Too Slow to Absorb Technological Change?‘ “the true challenge with advancing technologies isn’t the threats they impose, but more that society is sluggish at absorbing and making use of the technology at its current pace.”

technology-adoptionHonestly when one looks at the curves available on new technology adoption I don’t see so much of a difference on the latest technologies. In all cases adoption has been fairly rapid once the technology was there. The main difference might be how far reaching and simultaneously global the new technologies spread.

It does not seem to me that the rate of technology adoption is an issue. If it is a good and useful technology it gets adopted. Infrastructure will be modified to fit to it (sometimes with delays due to the investments required). The main issue is for us to learn how to deal with it, but honestly I can’t quite remember how work was before email as this change was so obviously great.

So let’s not believe that technology adoption is really a limiting factor. If a technology is useful and works, it spreads. Period.

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How Sustainable Change Management is About Developing Autonomy

Change management is about developing autonomy as part of a conscious evolution.

change_autonomyChange management without autonomy development is an illusion. It corresponds to the old command and control approach. It can only create deviations as soon as control is removed.

The only sustainable change is created by developing the autonomy of those who have to develop and implement it. Only thus will change be adapted to the situation and only thus can it be really deployed throughout an entire organization.

The development of this autonomy needs to be a conscious decision and process. If the organization is not ready to develop autonomy it can only keep those working approaches of the past.

The image is from the excellent Prosci presentation on ‘Demystifying Change Management’ on Slideshare

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