Category: Change

Why You Should Have a Success System Rather Than Success Goals

Scott Adams in the excellent book ‘How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life‘ is strongly against setting goals. He advocates rather develop a system for success and stick to it – and be ready to capture opportunities when they pop up at the right time.

systems not goalsThe main reason according to him is the conservation of personal energy: “Goal-oriented people exist in a state of continuous pre-success failure at best, and permanent failure at worst if things never work out. Systems people succeed every time they apply their systems, in the sense that they did what they intended to do. The goals people are fighting the feeling of discouragement at each turn. The systems people are feeling good every time they apply their system. That’s a big difference in terms of maintaining your personal energy in the right direction”

I find this viewpoint very interesting and challenging. Establishing a system that works consistently and reliably allows to avoid focusing on challenging goals that might never be reached, and allows to focus on a daily routine that will bear fruit. Hence for 2016 I have decided to focus my effort more on setting up a system than setting goals. And you?

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Why We Should Practice Nemawashi in Change Management

Nemawashi is an interesting lean management practice (part of the Toyota way), which means going around the decision-makers before a decision meeting to explain to them the foreseen change and prepare them for the decision.

nemawashi bonsaiBasically it means convince the participants one by one, or at least expose them to the decision they have to make. At the extreme, the decision meeting itself becomes just stating an evident decision.

I very much like the image – wikipedia states: “Nemawashi literally translates as “going around the roots”, from ne (root) and mawasu (to go around [something]). Its original meaning was literal: digging around the roots of a tree, to prepare it for a transplant. This process involves bringing the dirt from the new location, and introducing it to the tree, before the transplant, so the tree can grow accustomed to the new environment before it gets there.”

So let’s us have a process before transplanting new idea. Nemawashi!

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How Institutions Design Human Nature

In this interesting TED talk ‘The way we think about work is broken‘, Barry Schwartz describes how society and institutions shapes the way we think and we are – our human nature.

The military, an institution that definitely influences human nature
The military, an institution that definitely influences human nature

He elaborates how the Industrial production system (Adam Smith) aimed at making us cogs in a system with limited initiative, and how this shaped human nature in the past decades. “It is only human nature to have a human nature that is very much the product of the society in which people live. That human nature, that is to say our human nature, is much more created than it is discovered. We design human nature by designing the institutions within which people live and work.” Barry Schwartz then calls for decision-makers to shape their organizations and institutions in a manner that would create a new type of human nature in the Collaborative Age.

What I find interesting in the concept is to consider how institutions do influence human nature. It is quite true in a way, as we tend to act and respond according to some learned patterns from institutions and organizations we served; probably with some limits I think. But then as institutions evolve or are replaced, human nature needs to fit in a new way of being in society. That is possibly the most challenging side of the Fourth Revolution – former human nature will become obsolete as new institutions will shape another new one. And which sides of human nature do we want to develop?

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How to Make Hard Choices: Rely on What You Want to Be

Philosopher Ruth Chang’s TED talk on ‘How to Make Hard Choices‘ is quite an interesting insight into how we take tough decisions. According to Ruth Chang, we generally think we take the option that looks like the safest: “It’s a mistake to think that in hard choices, one alternative really is better than the other, but we’re too stupid to know which, and since we don’t know which, we might as well take the least risky option.”

There’s another way – I actually do have in my bag  a dice to help me take tough decisions when I can’t decide.

chooseBut in reality, Ruth shows that what we choose is actually what we want to be – and then after we rationalize to promote the option we prefer. “Instead of looking for reasons out there, we should be looking for reasons in here: Who am I to be?“. This is related to out unique capability to put our own selves into our decision, by projection of what we want to be.

As Ruth concludes: “we become the authors of our own lives“. Not everyone does it, but that is a unique capability that allows us to tackle tough decisions in our lives.

Take 15 mins to listen to this interesting talk:

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Why There is a Gap Between Technology and Organization Evolution

There is a gap between technology development and the way organization change. And this is at the root of the Fourth Revolution: if the gap gets large enough, only a revolution can make organizations evolve to fit with technology. And it is what is happening right now.

martecs_lawI find the illustration by Scott Brinker the best – he call it the Martec’s law: “Technology changes exponentially; organizations change logarithmically“. He applies it to the current digital disruption, but of course it was always the case – the industrial revolution was also created by a progressive mismatch between technology and the institutions and organizations of the previous Age. Organizations can only change at a certain pace, and the larger they are, the slower they can evolve; they generally can’t cope with the increasing rate of technology evolution without undergoing a substantial change.

According to this law, a revolution is inevitable that will rebaseline the organizational setup to the current state of technology development. And this will be highly disruptive to existing organizations – unless they find a way to overcome the curse of only being able to evolve slowly.

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Why You Should Constantly Develop the Leadership Capacity of Others

I stumbled on this excellent quote by Pamela Slim: “Your job is to build the leadership capacity of the community you serve.”

leadership_developmentPamela Slim continues: “What does this mean? Your success as a leader, whether as an independent professional, a manager in an organization, a coach or a parent, depends on your ability to provide challenging learning experiences that make the people around you stronger, more capable and more prepared to solve the problems that you all care about. In short, stop doing things for them and start supporting them to do things for themselves.”

Let’s pause for a moment here. I find this extremely insightful. Instead of teaching skills the conventional way, she states that we should mainly focused on developing other’ leadership capabilities. Quite a challenge, and this certainly challenges the conventional views. On the other hand it is quite right.

She concludes: “This is easier in theory than it is in practice.” Sure. When do we start?

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Why Increased Accessibility to Ideas Correlates with Overprotection trends

Broadening on our post on the recent trend in US colleges to overprotect from potentially offensive ideas, there is much more happening in the world with a growing contradiction with the much easier accessibility to all sorts of offensive ideas, pictures on internet and the increasingly defensive behavior of society.

caution-internetFor example, in some respect the development of head covering and niqab in the Muslim world (where in the 1960’s uncovered hair and face was the most common) is also some sort of reaction to this wider accessibility of non politically or socially correct sources.

It may well be that the development of these overprotective trends is the consequence of the wider access to disturbing ideas. The world would then be increasingly split between those that can deal with these disturbing ideas (without necessarily condoning them of course), and those that can’t or won’t.

Over time, this might become a bigger split in the world’s population than the issue of internet access, with pockets of overprotective societies in both developed and less developed countries.

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How Cars Are Nowadays The Most Sophisticated Machines on the Planet

“New high-end cars are among the most sophisticated machines on the planet, containing 100 million or more lines of code. Compare that with about 60 million lines of code in all of Facebook or 50 million in the Large Hadron Collider” – according to the New York Times ‘Complex Car Software Becomes the Weak Spot Under the Hood’.

le-corniaud
Cars were previously a much less complex contraption…

Complexity is there – many different parts with various codes that need to communicate so that everything works. Results can be quite unpredictable. Cheating can even be hidden inside the code, as the recent Volkswagen scandal showed.

The issue of code safety is a tremendous challenge to manufacturers and regulators alike. A strong position would require to remove all code lines that are not used in a particular model, but that is extremely costly as it goes against standardization. At some point it will be difficult to avoid unpredictable behavior of the system if there are various computing centers performing different functions in the car. Today, access to the proprietary code used by automakers is not even granted because of copyright protection. This will certainly evolve, and a framework for guaranteeing a minimum level of code reliability will have to be put in place.

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Why the Winners in the IoT Space Will be Those That Will Overcome Security Issues

The Internet of Things (IoT) means that an increasing number of “things” are connected to the internet. It’s coming, and it is going to change the industry.

Hacked_car in ditch
Hacked car in the ditch (Wired)

Read the now well-known story how hackers managed to compromise completely a Jeep Cherokee in Wired. Don’t you find that scary? And that is just the start of the problem as more and more objects get connected.

We can heap up all sorts of security layers, once something is connected to the internet, it will always be possible with sufficient effort to hack it (it needs to be worth the effort of course!). The questions about security, safety and privacy linked to the Internet of Things are substantial, and they have no obvious answer yet. This excellent article in Forbes summarizes the challenges. Now it is clear that for the moment “Connectivity [of things] has outpaced security“.

The winners in the Internet of Things space will be those that implement a comprehensive security approach – like those who won in the area of peer-to-peer online payments (like paypal) were ultimately those who were the best at avoiding fraud. It is about implementing a comprehensive systemic approach to security, and not a device-based approach.

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Why the Internet of Things Will Lead to the Emergence of New Industry Giants

The Internet of Things is coming: more and more objects have sensors that can be connected to the internet. We are actually lagging behind the available hardware to invent applications. But the actual capability is now present.

iot-infographic-212-billion“The big game changer is that when all these physical objects can sense, analyze and interact on their own, it changes how and where decisions are made, and who makes them. The important thing to remember though is the embedded device by itself is not the game changer….it’s the combination of the applications, the people, and the processes around the ‘things’” (from IBM Center for Applied Insights).

Implementing the IoT will take time, and many trials and inventions. A good summary of the challenges in this ParisTechReview paper ‘From flowerpots to containers: a subtle anatomy of Internet of Things’.

We can already predict the emergence of new giant players that will master the applications in the Internet of Things, like Google and Facebook emerged from the first and the second version of the internet. And it is not a given that this time they will emerge from the Silicon Valley. The game is open!

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How To Use Technology To Open More Possibilities

Technology is often seen as a threat – like Artificial Intelligence and the singularity where machines will become more intelligent that man. But technology is not too often mentioned as opening possibilities.

Since a long time technology is opening possibilities in the form of compensating for failing senses: pairs of glasses, hearing aids and other prosthetic help a lot of people live an normal life. Even more visibly for people with disabilities or who have lost limbs.

Neil-Harbisson
Neil Harbisson and his permanent cyborg implant

But technology also enables us to do things that we could not perform with our body alone: transport ourselves quickly, above ground and under ground, fly in the air… New technology will also give us the possibility to open new senses, in addition to provide support to our memory, allow us to understand foreign languages instantaneously, etc..

Some are already quite advanced in the cyborg world of increased senses such as Neil Harbisson, auto-proclaimed the first cyborg. As an artist he seeks to increase his perception by adding sensors that capture colors he can’t see and give him the information otherwise (through some brain wiring). Have a look at his TED talk!

In the future we should rather see how technology can expand our capabilities and support our creativity rather than shrink from a fear that it might replace us completely. But how we will operate with the new technology is still something that needs to be invented – a real revolution!

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How We Continue To Create New Neurons as Adults

Following on our post on brain plasticity there is new evidence that we continue to create neurons in our brains throughout our lives, and in particular in the Hippocampus, where our memories are stored.

neurogenesisA good summary is in this post ‘How Our Behaviors and Activities Control the Growth of New Cells‘ by Valeria Maltoni.

We do produce some new neurons. Not so many, but ‘Jonas Frisén from the Karolinska Institutet has estimated that we produce 700 new neurons per day in the hippocampus. You might think this is not much, compared to the billions of neurons we have. But by the time we turn 50, we will have all exchanged the neurons we were born with in that structure with adult-born neurons‘.

The next question is then, how we could or should influence this creation of new neurons. The post referred to supposes it is better to foster the creation of more, but I guess that is still part of research.

In any case, this research is another blow to the Industrial Age theory or all theories around the fact that we can’t change significantly behaviors and memories.

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