Category: Change

How Insurance Companies Can Leverage Technology to Control Behaviors

Insurance companies have always influenced behaviors through basic rules underlying their contracts, for exemple historically in terms of fire prevention. There can be a fine line between imposing some rules and actually controlling behavior. In this article ‘Draining the Risk Pool: Insurance companies are using new surveillance tech to discipline customers‘, modern practices of insurance companies are described that border on spying individual behaviors.

The trend is particularly acute in the US where health insurance is provided by private companies. It starts with some shocking statements about examples of companies prohibiting smoking or other possibly health-impacting behaviors because of insurance fees; and other companies promoting health-welness programs which appear to be quite mandatory. “Wellness programs are about exercising that leverage, reducing the risk profile of employees and thus cutting the employer’s costs for health insurance plans.”

However in the modern world, this means using apps and other devices to monitor progress and connect with colleagues, and those could ultimately be used for control purpose. Examples are give, from insurers that require wearing of personal health monitoring devices, or fitting cars with black boxes to determine driving patterns. All leaving to possible insurance access and price discrimination, leading to a much more personalized behavior influence. Boundaries to this approach and rules around fairness will have to be imposed by law.

With the development of personal devices and technology, insurance companies will certainly find a field of improved insight into client behaviors. Lawmakers will have to follow those trends closely to put the right boundaries.

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How Network Effects Create Negative Marginal Costs

In this post ‘Negative marginal cost‘, Seth Godin highlights that non only digital allows to produce at zero marginal costs, but that when network effects are added, marginal cost can actually be negative.

Negative marginal cost means that it costs more to produce less, or that it costs more to have less people connected and contributing. The network effect being exponential creates situations where the value generated by one additional user actually benefits the community by its presence.

As Seth Godin writes, “Moving from expensive to cheap to free to “it’s a bonus to add one more person” changes our economy and our culture forever.” Zero marginal cost was already the internet revolution; negative marginal cost is the social network revolution.

While this explains the exponential development and success of social networks, it is still useful to remember that internet uses a lot of resources and energy, and I am still not sure whether the marginal cost would remain effectively negative when we add those in – that’s actually quite an interesting research topic.

We always underestimate network effects like we underestimate exponential growth, and they indeed create an advantage to add users. We are just at the beginning of the network revolution!

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How People Adapt their Behaviors to Deceive the Digital Ecosystem

I loved those articles such as this one from the Verge ‘Watch a police officer admit to playing Taylor Swift to keep a video off YouTube‘ showing how people are adapting to take advantage of Artificial Intelligence to deceive the system.

The point being that YouTube deletes all videos with copyright infringement, and therefore by playing music while being video filmed, US policemen ensure those videos of their interventions will can’t be uploaded to YouTube. Brilliant! (I am not sure how well that works though!).

Anyway that’s a good example of how people adapt their behavior to deceive the AI and digital ecosystem. I am quite sure there are many more strategies used by the tech-savvy to evade modern surveillance and ubiquitous photos and cameras. And we may implement new behaviors more and more to adapt to this digital world.

It is just the start of adapting our behaviors to deceive the digital ecosystem and AI surrounding us. Expect this to become much more prevalent!

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How Courage, Anger and Rage fit together

Austin Kleon – a famous author on creativity – writing about ‘What to do with your feelings‘ mentions in particular the issue of courage. “People often ask me how I got the courage to put my work into the world. I’m not sure I have any courage, but I do have rage.”

He continues explaining how anger can be channeled in an useful emotion (although this requires quite some control) in a situation where there is a need to react to something out there which is not quite right.

“Whenever you are out of ideas, there’s someone, somewhere, with bad ideas that need to be corrected. But you don’t necessarily have to talk about the bad ideas, or take them on directly, you can just articulate the good ideas that cancel them out.”

Anger could thus be the source of positive alchemy, if used right. And it is true that more often than not, ‘courage’ requires ‘rage’ to express itself.

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How Modern Streaming Leads to Watching and Listening Faster

Have you noticed this possibility on streaming portals to watch movies or listen to music faster? I discovered this feature in Netflix, but there now also tools to speed up any video on Chrome or other browsers – without having an effect on sound frequency or too much distortion.

I must confess I am using this feature regularly when I need to watch movies or series in a time-constrained circumstance. But now I tend to use it quite regularly even without such constraints. It is like accelerated reading and is an interesting evolution of the way we consume video or audio.

Of course this interferes with the original intent of the creator of the video or audio track, who had probably decided on the original pace with much thought, and in a way this thus interferes with the creator intent. At the same time it is also the direction of modern usage of media that we try to cram as much in the limited time we have to consume those experiences.

I am quite convinced that the media producers will soon notice the trend and change the way they produce media to accommodate this trend of accelerated listening and viewing. Still it shows the current tension between our physically limited time and the wish to consume more media experience.

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How User Tables May Become Obsolete and How It Will Affect Internet Giants

In this very interesting post ‘The Billion User Table – The login is the gateway to the internet. And it’s about to get decentralized‘ some insight is given into the user data that is managed by internet giants and how much it is worth to them: the user table. With user blockchains this may be soon something from the past.

This photograph taken on September 28, 2017, shows a smartphone being operated in front of GAFA logos (acronym for Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon web giants) as background in Hédé-Bazouges, western France. (Photo by Damien MEYER / AFP)

User tables is the main data repository of all internet and cloud services about their users, and it is what makes the worth of internet companies. “Even if your users are registering via a social sign-on button — i.e., they sign in with Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc. — you’ve still got a users table with information that lets you track users and market to them.” This serves to enhance your impact but also to lock-in users one way or the other by knowing what they are doing even outside your services.

“So the entire online attention economy is built around proprietary users tables that different apps jealously guard and are constantly trying to grow. This being the case, the size of this table is a direct measure of the size of a tech platform. It’s not a proxy measure, either. It’s truly direct, because it’s literally the same number that the platforms are using internally and that partners and investors are using externally.”

At the moment each major platform has its own separate user table. But with the blockchain used as identification this approach is under threat. User tables would become centralized and major internet players could not leverage them in the competition. According to the author it may be a substantial revolution in the way network value is created on the internet. Definitely a new technology to be watched!

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How Quick New Energy Sources Can Grow

This interesting ‘The Conversation’ post ‘Nuclear fusion breakthrough: what do new results mean for the future of ‘infinite’ energy?‘ expands on the possibilities of nuclear fusion in view of recent progress. It also quite usefully puts back into perspective the historical growth rates of recent energy sources.

As can be seen on the graph, which includes some possible predictions for fusion, the growth rate of wind and solar has been quite tremendous, in particular for solar.

In the article the same growth rate is anticipated for fusion once the technology becomes operational. This still shows that it will not be really significant before the end of the century.

New emerging energy sources often take some time for maturity. Then then scale and that is the time where we can observe their drawbacks. The same will inevitably happen for fusion as it is not entirely clean either (generating tritium pollution for example). Still, the graph shows how prevalent an energy can become in a few years and decades and puts back the introduction of new sources of energy production in a new perspective.

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How to Improve Personal Projects

Seth Godin in his post ‘Five useful questions‘ advises us to ask some fundamental questions on our personal projects so that we address the right things and so that we don’t let us being distracted by less important stuff.

  • What’s the hard part?
  • How are you spending your time?
  • What do you need to know?
  • What is the scary part?
  • Is it worth it?

Having the right answer to those questions enables us to identify which projects are really those that will make us evolve and improve.

I like in particular the questions about the hard part and the scary part. It is those parts we will struggle to address, not necessarily because they are so hard, but because they are beyond our comfort zone and usual capabilities. Still if we want to progress we need to address those and make sure we increase our comfort zone reach. This is particularly true about getting the right data and the right interactions to reach our goals.

It is really useful to interrogate our projects with some fundamental questions about alignment and whether they will effectively lead to self-improvement.

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How Commuting to Work May Have Positive Psychological Benefits

This interesting and recommended The Atlantic column ‘The Psychological Benefits of Commuting to Work‘ takes a novel view on remote work, highlighting positive aspects of actual commuting. The main effect would be to create a barrier between personal and work life, in effect a time buffer for disconnection.

“Employers—even the ones that have provided the tools for remote work—see cause for alarm. “No commute may be hurting, not helping, remote worker productivity,” a Microsoft report warned last fall. After-hours chats were up 69 percent among users of the company’s messaging platform, and workers were less engaged and more exhausted.”

Historical studies would have shown that average commuting times have always be around 60 mins per day even since roman and greek times. ““You get a very strong feeling of two lives with the train a bridge.” The distance between those two lives is explored in a body of research loosely known as “boundary theory,” and this, perhaps, is where we see the commute’s more important job.”

There are even recommendations if you are working remotely to have certain rituals which may include a short stroll to set the boundary between working time and private time.

I am personally not so sure that this border between work and private life really continues to exist as we continue to be connected all day long to work through our phones. Still it is true that the psychological effect of distance between work and family life is important at least from the geographical perspective – having a separate work space at home certainly helps.

It thus may be a good idea when working remotely to actively and consciously implement a ritual to demonstrate the switch between working and family time and ensure that this transition is clearly delineated.

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How to Take Delight in Uncertainty

Leo Babauta in his post ‘Delight in Uncertainty‘ explains how most people have difficulties with uncertainty in our lives, and highlights the positives associated with appreciating this uncertainty. As a recovering foe of uncertainty, this certainly resonates with me!

“We don’t like uncertainty, we want to avoid or control uncertainty, we get stressed when we can’t. And uncertainty is unavoidable: everything is uncertain all the time!“

So what can we do? First take stock that certainty is too boring: “We might instinctively dislike uncertainty, but in truth, we would be so bored without it.” Uncertainty is also the place to learn and to grow.

It is not easy to welcome uncertainty, and it does require an amount of practice. The usual corporate world generally does not provide it. Personally, I am practicing since I have started my company and I am not quite too sure who my clients and what my activity will be in 3 to 6 months! And I end up enjoying it because I know this provides space for unexpected opportunities.

Leo Babauta insists on some practices to learn to welcome uncertainty: notice the uncertainty, dance with it, set the joy in it and dance with it.

Whatever your approach, it is very satisfying to have a confident relationship with uncertainty. And yes, it takes time and practice because our Industrial Age education taught us about how to behave in a certain world. Nevertheless we can embrace uncertainty, and dance with it!

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How Stories Change Cultures

In this interesting post ‘The Connection Between Narrative and Culture‘, Valeria Maltoni addresses how cultures change. Cultures being often defined by narratives (like popular stories), they are at the center of cultural change too.

“Culture develops over larger time horizons. It’s a reflection of a society’s or group orientation. Like the market, collective attention determines what people carry forward. Hence the prevailing narratives. Some see change as the result of influence by a group of outsiders. […] I have another theory of change […] It does start with a story. But the story has to reflect the reality to draw from it. Not just be utopia.“

I find this approach interesting. In a world where stories are constantly created over social networks, the emergence of strong collective stories may be what changes cultures. It requires diversity, infusion of new ideas, and this creates stories and memes. At the end of the day, it makes cultures evolve.

The idea that cultures are defined by collective stories and evolve through stories is quite strong. And quite actionnable.

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How to Create Habits Effectively

This interesting article ‘Strategies for creating (or destroying) habits‘ summarizes principles of habits change management and provides an applicable four-pronged model: cue, craving, routine, reward.

In more detail:

  • How can I make it obvious? (Cue)
  • How can I make it attractive? (Craving)
  • How can I make it easy? (Response, Routine)
  • How can I make it satisfying? (Reward)

The first step is to make our current habit conscious and visible, and understand how it gets triggered. The second step is to make the new habit particularly attractive by associating it with an expected outcome; in that area, benefitting from the right environment and social pressure is clearly an advantage. The third step is to ensure that is easy to trigger the new habit; and finally the fourth step is to reward the new behaviors.

Worth remembering that changing habits (once we are aware of the need) can be enhanced by a structured approach. It is worth reviewing it from time to time as we all have habits to change.

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