Category: Collaborative Age

How Innovation Will Necessarily Alter the Power Balance

Following up on our previous post on why real disruptive innovation does have to change business models, this inspirational image from Hugh MacLeod is a great complement.

original_ideas_hugh2Real good ideas do necessarily alter the power relationships (and that is why they are always resisted, but that is another story).

Power relationships include those relationships in an organization’s hierarchy as well as those relationships in a market.

When I am facilitating, it is interesting to see how I can feel that the group stumbled upon a good idea – when someone starts feeling uneasy about this is going to change power relationships (and in general, his or her own power). Resistance starts to kick-in. It is a sure sign that we hit the nail on the head and that a good idea has been produced. It needs to be captured before it dilutes itself, and assessed to check whether it is just good, or whether it is great.

Image and inspiration by Hugh MacLeod at GapingVoid.com

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How Innovative Organization Forms Must Address our Psychological Need for Visible Status

In this blog we have made the case on how the Fourth Revolution (and its widespread availability of communication capability) will lead to a much flatter organization – and that it does scare many people (see the post “What is so Awful About the Disappearance of Hierarchy?“). There is currently considerable debate about the need for hierarchy, like for example in this recent Stanford Business School article, ‘The Case for Workplace Hierarchy‘.

hierarchyOne of the points of the paper is that “power structures haven’t changed much over time, […] the way organizations operate today actually reflects hundreds of years of hierarchical power structures, and remains unchanged because these structures ‘can be linked to survival advantages’ in the workplace“. Also, “hierarchies deliver practical and psychological value, in part by fulfilling deep-seated needs for order and security“.

Hierarchy would then be justified by deep psychological needs to recognize effectively and visibly a power structure that would help people orient themselves.

There is no doubt that societies or groups or people do tend to organize themselves around a spoken or unspoken power balance and that hierarchy has the benefit of making power and status immediately visible. It is very possible that most of us do need some kind of social hierarchy to fit in, as a deep-seated psychological need. Still there are other ways to show visibly power or importance, and these ways are being used or developed by social networks today (recognition of top contributors, peer ratings, Klout score etc.). They are not mature yet and this is an area of interesting and controversial development.

What I take from this debate is clearly that flatter or no hierarchy is only possible if there is a clear way to visibility show some kind of status in the organization, and that successful companies that implement new ways of organizing themselves need to address this psychological need. What do you think?

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How to Get Good at Life

“Getting good at change (big, small, tiny – every day) means getting good at life” – James Altucher.

Pessimist and Optimist vs Change
Churchill’s view of Change

Life is all about managing change. We change every day since we are born, and the world changes every day around us.

Let’s try to get good at change instead of trying to stick to illusory stability.

It can be scary at times, but so much more rewarding.

Change is pure opportunity.

 

 

“Do it without expectation. Wish for nothing. Care for everything. Happiness will be in between.”

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How to Unleash the Power of Connectional Intelligence

“In our new world of an embedded digital infrastructure that connects all of our lives, the power of connectional intelligence holds exponential, and previously untapped, potential for breakthroughs in ways we can barely begin to imagine” writes Saj-Nicole Joni in ‘Win Big by Unleashing Millennials’ Connective Intelligence‘.

Multicolored plugsShe continues “Connectional intelligence is your ability to make breakthroughs by connecting ideas, people, information, and resources. You use CxQ whenever you sift through multiple sources of information to put pieces of a puzzling problem together in new ways. It’s in your ability to build and realize value from networks of relationships, in your ability to convene communities, to marshal a various of resources to focus on a result, and to make diversity and differences productive.”. According to her, people with high connectional intelligence have always existed – but now it is much easier and much more widespread than ever before.

So, how much do you develop and exploit your connectional intelligence in your daily practice? If you do not – at least consciously – it looks like a good time to go at it – and enter the Fourth Revolution world in a more active way!

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Why Organization’s Stability Should Be Used To Enhance External Disruption

Following on our latest post on the increase of the world’s unpredictability, Robert Branche makes also an excellent point that as nature designed living organisms that would dramatically increase the unpredictability of the world, it had to design organisms that were more stable inside. And actually, from plants to animals, to mammals, internal stability has increased dramatically with evolution.

storm and stability
A storm on stability

This is a very interesting contradiction: to enhance the world’s changes, internal stability is required. And this observation actually applies to many situations.

Robert Branche extends this observation to organizations: for him, companies or organizations are a way to build an internal stability to become able to transform the world. “Internal order and rules should not reduce uncertainty, but make its development and acceptance easier” states Robert Branche in the case of large corporations.

Organizations that would implement internal rules for the sake of increasing internal and external certainty are ultimately doomed. Organizations need to develop and nurture internal stability as a way to enhance their disruptive impact on the world.

What a challenge to all established organizations!

How does your organization fare? Is it really defending its stability to make a bigger, more disruptive impact on the world?

Reference is made to Robert Branche‘s latest book “les Radeaux de Feu” (in French). Visit Robert Branche’s blog (in French) for more about the author and his latest book.

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Why our World’s Unpredictability Ever Increases

Robert Branche in his excellent new book, “les Radeaux de Feu” (in French) makes an extremely interesting point about the fact that entropy – the natural evolution of the universe – is not about increasing disorder, but is all about increasing unpredictability.

random unpredictable dicesHis thesis is then that all of nature’s invention – life, first cells, then plants, then animals and ultimately humans – is all about increasing dramatically unpredictability of the world. And it is true that at each step, the number of possible future states increases dramatically. Today humans have transformed the world at a much higher and unpredictable pace than plants have ever done, or than the mineral world has ever achieved.

What lesson does it bear for us? It is clear that unpredictability of our life, of our world will ever increase at an accelerated pace – that is a physical law. And the Fourth Revolution, this inter-connection of humans, will accelerate that transformation even more. We should not be looking for any stability soon. So instead of complaining, let’s rather enjoy the transformation!

Visit Robert Branche’s blog (in French) for more about the author and his latest book.

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Why You Should Become Better at Change… by Practicing Change

“Getting good at change (big, small, tiny – every day) means getting good at life” writes James Altucher in this excellent post.

LifeChangeWe certainly all need to become better at taking change as an opportunity rather than a threat. Change is actually always quite good in terms of excitement and learning. “When you change you go from a flattening learning curve (your old situation) to a steep learning curve (the new situation). Steep learning curves feel good. Like the feeling of new love.”

Of course, changes are not always ignited by us; they can be the result of external forces we don’t control. Sometimes one reason we suffer too much is because we’ve become rusty at change, because we don’t practice enough; we have become too sedentary in our habits. One key secret is probably to exercise at change by changing often. By becoming a nomad of sorts when it comes to our habits. We can exercise this very well by travelling; by relocating elsewhere; and by trying to change our habits and activities often.

A final word from James Altucher: “[Change] without expectation. Wish for nothing. Care for everything. Happiness will be in between“.

Go for it!

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How the Fourth Revolution Now Touches all Age Categories

The graph below shows clearly how the social networks now touch the majority of people in all age categories.

social media by age groupSocial network adoption is visibly increasingly widespread with all age groups. Older people also do increasingly use social networks to communicate with family and extended relationship.

This might even lead some providers like Facebook, Twitter and the like to have to change a bit their offering or the format of their interface.

These statistics are for the US, from my personal experience I don’t see why it would be widely significant worldwide even in emerging countries.

The power that is being released in terms of social communication is massive as it now pervades inter-generational links. Watch for more amazing consequences and value creation!

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How to Thrive Personally through the Upcoming Societal Changes

‘Middle class’ disappears as a result of the Fourth Revolution. We have also described the society issues we are facing with  the disappearance of ‘middle class’ and how we can resolve them. In this post we will examine the consequences of this event from an individual perspective.

Middle class becomes poorer

While society needs to find solutions to deal with the increased inequality which will necessarily happen as a result of the Fourth Revolution, what should an individual do to be more certain to be part of the people who will benefit from the change?

“Choose to commoditize your labor or choose yourself to be a creator, an innovator, an artist, an investor, a marketer, and an entrepreneur. I say “and” rather than “or” because you have to be all of the above. Not just one” says James Altucher in his book ‘Choose Yourself‘.

Choose to be creative. It is a skill that can be trained and developed, and you should start now. On the long term, developing your creativity and being able to show it to the world is the key to your success in the Collaborative Age.

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Why the Disappearance of ‘Middle Class’ is Linked to the Fourth Revolution

There are more and more converging papers, posts and books about the disappearance of the ‘middle class’. The ‘middle class’ actually is quite a specific concept linked to the Industrial Age – it did not exist before: employees of corporations with a significant buying power and certainty in future revenue and position, that could hence spend in a number of consumption goods and invest in property, own their own house…

The income of the median population is significantly shrinkingIt seems quite visible from the available statistics that in effect, the wealth of the ‘middle class’ is diminishing; that less and less people can be described as being part of this group (as shown by the graph above); and that the very characteristics that described it – job security, relatively good buying power etc – seem to be disappearing.

As many authors today, I believe it is a structural change brought about by the Fourth Revolution – and not just the result of increased inequality that would be due by globalization (low salaries elsewhere…). It is due by a shift in value creation. The relatively repetitive and often bureaucratic work of the middle class is increasingly being taken up by automatic systems and soon by robots. Value concentrates in the creative work that gives life to these systems and tools.

This will pose a number of problems to our societies:

  • the consumption economy is in great part based on the buying power of the middle class
  • value creation will concentrate on a smaller percentage of the people, which will require a revamp of the redistribution policies to maintain social harmony.

This shift is probably the most critical societal shift created by the Fourth Revolution. Are you ready for it?

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The Intrinsic Long Tail of Online Education Graduation Statistics

With the Fourth Revolution comes this new challenge to traditional universities: online courses and degrees. We have mentioned this transformation in the posts ‘online universities are becoming mainstream!‘ and ‘Another institution under siege from the Fourth Revolution: Universities‘.

online-coursesIn this excellent article in Fast Company, an interesting statistic become apparent. “As Thrun [the founder of Udacity] was being praised by Friedman, and pretty much everyone else, for having attracted a stunning number of students–1.6 million to date–he was obsessing over a data point that was rarely mentioned in the breathless accounts about the power of new forms of free online education: the shockingly low number of students who actually finish the classes, which is fewer than 10%. Not all of those people received a passing grade, either, meaning that for every 100 pupils who enrolled in a free course, something like five actually learned the topic. If this was an education revolution, it was a disturbingly uneven one.” Further, “a recent study found that only 7% of students in this type of class actually make it to the end. (This is even worse than for-profit colleges such as the University of Phoenix, which graduates 17% of its full-time online students, according to the Department of Education.)“.

Online education does mean effort, and there is probably some kind of long tail effect at work here: not all of those that say they intend to go for the course will go for it at the end, as it entails a significant commitment. This number should not be a surprise; and as the number of online registered students will increase dramatically, even if the percentage of those that graduate remains small, the number of people who will have benefited will still remain large – and above all, anybody, anywhere in the world, can now take the opportunity. People will simply drop out by themselves if they don’t show the necessary commitment.

The low number of graduates is not a limit of the system, it is but an intrinsic long tail effect. It does not mean failure; the sheer number of graduates does mean success of online education.

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How Mobile Ubiquity Changes Radically Business Models, Right Now

Calling a taxi has always been a nightmare in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia: operators that did not understand my english, drivers that couldn’t find the address or got lost on the way, negotiation with those that do not want to use their taxi meter… Last time I went friends made me discover a mobile app, “MyTeksi”.

MyTeksi home screen
The home screen of the app. Remark the “+RM 0” field which allows you to raise the stakes if you can’t get a taxi through an additional tip

It is actually a pair of apps: one for clients, one for drivers. Both figure out the location of the devices, and you can book a taxi instantly, as well as see whether available taxis are around on the map. The economic model is that the drivers pay a small sum of money (less than 50 cents USD) for each successful booking, while the client pay the normal additional booking fee to the driver, who commits to use the taximeter. The app gives you the name of the driver, tracks the actual journey, and send you a summary email, which is a great selling point for lone women’s safety.

The feature I like particularly is the possibility to add a “tip” if you can’t get a taxi in the midst of peak hour (or raining). You can actually raise the stakes live until you get a taxi happy to pick you up! Real time bargaining in action!

This app business model is completely disruptive, by-passing the traditional centralized taxi booking systems and companies. It is based on the widespread availability of smart-phones even for taxi-drivers. Actually, it was brainstormed as part of a Harvard MBA homework business case by two Malaysian students (here is a good link to the story). In addition, the interface is simple and very well thought.

The app is now spreading to neighbouring countries, Thailand, Indonesia and Singapore. It will be interesting to see how successful it will be in developing countries, and not just in emerging countries.

What I find particularly interesting is that it pushes back the decision to the drivers instead of the centralized taxi booking system, leaving them with the choice to adhere to the system or not, or even to have several booking systems working for them.

Once again, the Fourth Revolution gets rid of centralized institutions. It also shows how widespread smartphones are (would all taxi drivers have one in developed countries? really?). Expect to see many more ground-breaking mobile applications coming up that will shake established business models!

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