Collaborative Age value production system | The Fourth Revolution Blog

How the Internet Has Become the Nervous System of the 21st Century

“The internet has become the nervous system of the 21st century, wiring together devices that we carry, devices that are in our bodies, devices that our bodies are in“. This observation is from Cory Doctorow in a great column in the Guardian ‘The internet is the answer to all the questions of our time’.

internet map — A map of the internet. Doesn’t it look like a neuron map?

Internet is now the location where all the societal fights will be won or lost. It is increasingly the dominating medium of all the conversations that really matter. And following on his usual battle cry on a free internet, Cory Doctorow continues: “Without a free, fair and open internet, proponents of urgent struggles for justice will be outmaneuvered and outpaced by their political opponents, by the power-brokers and reactionaries of the status quo. The internet isn’t the most important fight we have; but it’s the most foundational.”

I like this image of the internet as a nervous system pervading our society, linking together the members of humanity. It is not just a neutral communication medium. It is now a pervasive part of our humanity.

Why We Should Limit our Usage of Instant Messengers

As you know, I am quite keen on new communication technology and I love the possibilities brought to us by the Fourth Revolution. At the same time, minimizing attention-disturbing interruptions is essential for productive work. As a result, I find myself taking an increasingly strong position against all sorts of Instant Messaging Apps, in particular on the phone.

For example lately I had an argument with an acquaintance because I did not want to install on my phone a widely known chat app. Of course it makes communication easy, free and instantaneous. My point was that I did not want to be interrupted constantly, and that I try to keep significant chunks of time available for focus. Therefore, I prefer asynchronous communication means such as email, and limit drastically instant messaging tools. I keep old-fashioned SMS for emergencies, because it’s harder and it costs a bit of money – so that people think twice before using it!

Have you ever tried to focus on meaningful work while responding to Instant Messages? I can’t. As a result I tend to lose time or do things of minor importance in the meantime. Instant Messenger is supposedly designed to save time, but it distracts us from doing the important stuff.

I thus minimize those tools, remove all sorts of notifications on my phone, and for those that are unavoidable, I use the functions that allow to be undisturbed while I do important work.

Discipline is required for instant messaging tools. What is your’s?

How to Deal With Experts’ Arrogance

I am always struck by how experts can easily become arrogant and ego-driven, and how widespread this issue is, in particular among scientists. It is actually quite rare to find experts that remain sufficiently open-minded to consider potentially contradicting evidence without trying first to dismiss it based on their expertise.

This is a significant hurdle in a number of practical situations and needs to be overcome (without creating screams and damaging egos).

At the start of my professional career I toyed with the idea of going into scientific research. So I took the opportunity to work in an applied research lab. What struck me quickly was how arrogant most of the senior scientists were. It was the arrogance born out of expertise in an area. They thought they knew. As it happened that I brought in some novel ideas in a certain field, the debate was not scientific about ideas but immediately became ego-driven. And emotionally loaded it was! People screamed and finger-pointed on the basis of a detail in a remote scientific field.

Of course, this attitude is not scientific; in science a theory only holds until someone finds contradictory evidence, and at that point a new, a better theory must be developed.

This expert arrogance is a significant hurdle for multidisciplinary work, and also for improving science. It needs to be dealt with forcefully at times to enable discussion and progress.

I find the best approach with those arrogant experts is to show to them that the problem at stake is not fully contained in their field, but maybe only touching, or at least that their opinion is not going to be questioned in the narrow field of their expertise. Hence you need first to determine on what exact limits the expert considers himself to know everything; and then make sure that your problem goes beyond. You will be able to get the recommendation of the expert, and adapt or dismiss it without creating an ego issue, because the problem is in an other area! If you have several experts in different fields it works the same. This gives the freedom to aggregate all those expert opinions.

How Timing Is The Top Success Factor for StartUps

A presentation by Bill Gross of IdeaLab on TED about startup success factors has generated a lot of comments in the last weeks.

In this talk, he gives the results from a study he has done over success factors of startups. This study seems to have been done on a reasonably wide sample. Here are the results (the percentages indicate the % of contribution):

Timing (42%)
Team & execution (32%)
Idea (28%)
Business model (24%)
Funding (14%)

This result has generated a lot of comments, because of course, assigning to timing the number one success factor diminishes the importance of the people in the startup (working hard, having a great idea) and around (Venture Capitalists and funders in particular). It is although a tough nut to crack for those specialists and supporters of business planning and business model development.

Yet from my limited experience, timing appears to be really a significant contributor to the success of new ventures – as well as chance. In our complex world we can’t continue to believe that everything is predictable.

So, if you want to start a new venture, check if the timing is right. You can’t always know, but you can certainly have a hint.

Here’s Bill Gross TED talk (6 mins only)

How to Measure the Value of Online Identities

The Newrepublic article “The BOT Bubble: How Click Farms Have Inflated Social Media Currency” is an absolute must-read and mind-blowing piece about the underground economy of fake social media accounts.

The click farm owner on his bed of SIM Cards

It describes in detail the operation of a ‘click farm’ in the Philippines where fake Facebook users are created by the thousands to create followers for greedy companies (hint: it takes one SIM card per user to get through the Facebook check algorithm, hence it looks more like a SIM card storage!).

According to the article, about 7 to 10% of social media users are fake, and those profiles are leveraged to create sudden ‘following’ and ‘liking’ or brands, presidential candidates etc. This can seriously distort the real following of public brands. Of course it is also a way to distort the effectiveness of online advertising and therefore, to make advertisers lose money.

Those ‘click farms’ are another massive, cheap employment created in developing countries by social networks, parallel to the legitimate service providers that provide moderation services; and other less legitimate that provide filtering services in some countries.

An online identity has got value, and some people are ready to pay heavily for fakes that they can control and have just the right profile. Accordingly, the value of real online identities is much higher, just because of the data we are giving to social networks.

Hat tip to Mitch Joel in his usually great weekly 6 links worthy of your attention.

Three Unexpected Issues of the Collaborative Age

In a remarkable talk, Scott Belsky (Head of Behance, the leading online platform for creatives to showcase their creative work), shares some very interesting findings about the operation of the Collaborative Age’s internet.

He initially supposed that:

careers would be more independent and distributed
people would be far more collaborative
opportunity would be increasingly determined by merit, creating a new meritocracy.

Practically, through the platform he founded, he found that meritocracy, innovation and access to opportunity are not natural on the web. In particular:

niche communities tend to be created which limit the ‘long tail effect’ and prevents encounter-driven creativity
the critical mass concept for rating work does not fully work, and a lot of creative work gets commoditized for a low price (e.g. logo creation)
there is a very widespread lack of attribution on the web, which limits the value of creative people’s portfolio and the leverage they can get from it.

It is not yet clear if these issues are structural issues of the Collaborative Age, or if they are transition issues as the Fourth Revolution unfolds.

Listen to his talk here:

What the Different Maturity Stages of Big Data Analytics Are

It is increasingly trendy to speak about ‘Big Data’ and ‘data analytics’.

I like to use a framework to assess the maturity of what people are speaking about. This allows to understand what level of ambition we are discussing, because there is often some confusion.

Stage 0: reporting (of current processes – include more or less elaborate indicators)
Stage 1: comparison / benchmarking (with other similar processes, present or past)
Stage 2: correlations (establish data correlation between data series)
Stage 3: causation (more difficult than correlation, establish a causation link through root cause analysis etc.)
Stage 4: simulation (use the deep understanding gained in the previous stage to predict what will happen in slightly or very different conditions; and use the result to ascertain if the understanding is correct)

Stages 1 to 3 require ‘Big Data’ or at least the availability of a large number of series that can be observed for comparison, correlation and causation. In a lot of instances I have also observed people jump from stage 2 to 4, which we know is very dangerous as the bigger the data set, the more probable we can observe spurious correlations (see for example for fun the previous post ‘How We Will Need Specialists to Make Sense of the Authenticity of Big Data Correlations‘)

This simple framework can be very powerful to refer to when dealing with Big Data – do not hesitate to use it!

Why Higher Entrepreneurship Activity is Not Good News

The statistics about entrepreneurship in the US as brought together by the Kauffman foundation are clear: there is more people creating businesses when people have difficulties to find a job. Or, in summary, entrepreneurship is in majority a defensive move, contrary to what popular lore would tend to spread.

KAUFFMAN-INDEX — The Overall Entrepreneurship index shows that there is more entrepreneurs in tough economical times

The data is clear: it is in a bad economy that the entrepreneurship ratio is higher, such as between 2009 and 2013 (see figure).

Similarly, immigrants have entrepreneurship ratios that can be twice as high as people born in the US, and people with high school education or less are also more frequently starting their own business, etc. In particular industries that go through tough times such as currently the Oil & Gas industry, the rate of business creation seems to increase significantly.

If a large amount of business creation is thus defensive, there is no surprise that many fail, due to the lack of preparation of the owner, or simply due to the fact that when times get better, business owners come back to more traditional employment.

Contrary to what most people think, the dynamism of entrepreneurship is not necessarily the sign of a dynamic economy; it could be the contrary. Some healthy level of entrepreneurship is necessary for economic development, but a higher ratio might not be good news.

All figures in this post from the Kauffman report.

What Collaborative Age Education Should Concentrate On

Education requires a major revamp nowadays with the Fourth Revolution. We don’t need anymore the Industrial Age schooling that was designed to educate the resources needed by the industry (in summary, compliant and literate).

Collaborative Age requires people that are collaborative, creative and know how to deal with the vast amounts of data and information available at everybody’s fingertips. This excellent paper from ParisTech review ‘Education Series – 2 – New knowledge, new know-how: skills for the 21st Century‘ summarizes some essential traits of future education:

Managing data to find useful information
Maintaining and developing creativity
Navigating diversified knowledge spheres

I think this paper forgets about a very important aspect of future education, which are the soft skills require to collaborate effectively. Industrial Age education promoted individual excellence (for example though the typical exams); Collaborative Age education needs to promote teamwork and team success.

In any case, “Developing a culture like this requires that the learners be not afraid to fail. […] If you want to discover new ideas, you must be prepared to take risks and to make mistakes. […] In the same vein, schools today do not value differences. In many instances, there is only one right answer to a question, whereas a creative approach enables students to propose new answers to a given problem, seen from a totally different angle or point of view. Conformity must be abandoned and intellectual curiosity stimulated“.

Why Data Monopoly is Not Like Physical Monopolies

A paper in Harvard Business Review takes the position that ‘Data Monopolists Like Google Are Threatening the Economy‘. According to this paper, beyond the usage of massive data to create value through data mining, the fact that these troves of data are concentrated within a limited number of major actors is a major issue akin to the concentration of means of production in the early XXth century in the hand of a few monopolists.

I don’t agree with this analysis. First, there are always new actors coming into play that take significant shares of the available data. For example one could argue that Facebook today concentrates a lot of personal data, and it is only a fairly recent entrant compared to Google and Yahoo.

Second, there is no major capital investment barrier like for infrastructure or industrial facilities that were at the origin of the anti-monopolistic laws. There is no limited resources like for oil, or extremely expensive investments required like for heavy industries. Data and its management is not entirely free, but reasonably cheap so that new entrants can still appear. In addition the amount of data generated worldwide increases exponentially, creating ever more opportunities.

Yes, significant value can be created by clever organizations out of Big Data. No, these are not monopolies that impede the operations of the market, as long as internet usage is maintained equal for all users.

Please comment if you don’t agree!

How Quick Bureaucracy Can Creep In… and How to Prevent It

I have had some experiences lately where I have seen bureaucracy creep in projects in a very significant and quick manner, creating a serious impediment to progress and success. Although I know that it is the fate of many organizations, I was astonished by the mere speed at which bureaucracy can be created and imposed, even in project organizations that had been newly set-up only weeks or months ago.

Bureaucracy is not the same as developing and implementing effective processes. Bureaucracy is about creating processes of little effectiveness (even if very efficient!).

In the instances I observed, bureaucracy developed quickly in situations where the scope of work was not very well defined. Thus, significant initiative and cognitive work were required to move things forward. In this situation many contributors, maybe not keen to do the effort, will seek to look busy doing ‘stuff’. And this ‘stuff’ generally turns out to be the seed of bureaucracy. It is easy to look busy writing endless reports and participating to endless meetings!

So, one way to avoid this situation is to be extremely clear on the scope of work and on the tangible deliverables that need to be produced. It also explains why in phases of innovation, it is better to keep the team small, so as to avoid the temptation by those that might not be at the core of the creative process to develop bureaucracy (to look and keep busy).

Bureaucracy can truly stifle a project. Make sure it does not develop beyond the minimum necessary – in particular as in modern times the mechanical data management should be automatized.

For those interested, the best text on bureaucracy ever is from Parkinson in the Economist in 1955 and is accessible at this link: Parkinson’s law. (as known today, Parkinson’s law states that ‘work always expands to fit the time available‘).

Why Failure Should be Inevitable but not Destruction

“Success is most often achieved by those who don’t know that failure is inevitable” is a famous quote by Coco Chanel, recently mentioned by Richard Branson as one of his favorite quotes on failure.

Clearly Coco Chanel was an entrepreneur as well so she must have know what it means to take into look at failure in the eyes, and feel the sting of it.

It is tough to accept that failure will be inevitable, yet it is the only way to advance.

At the same time, successful entrepreneurs know that leaps of faith must be carefully planned and tested so as not to make the rest of their creation stumble – just as share brokers know that failure (gaining money) is inevitable on part of their portfolio but have a portfolio management process that mitigates these risks.

Failure is inevitable, and it should reflect risk taking and creativity. Destruction is not, it is a matter of careful planning and risk management.

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