Collaborative Age | The Fourth Revolution Blog

How to Overcome The Link Between Job and Identity

In the Industrial Age, job title was very much one’s social identity, in particular related to the position in pyramidal organization charts. In many countries like France, the studies (university, degree) and grade achievements was also very much one’s identity. It is still the case at various levels.

However, this easy-to-relate identify definition will disappear in the Collaborative Age as the importance of conventional organizations will progressively disappear, and as we will be increasingly on our own without a fixed ‘job’, or at least only with temporary ones.

This situation creates a lot of stress on personal identity. It is thus a high barrier for those that hesitate to jump out of traditional organizations; or, those who get retrenched or lose their job and have to reinvent themselves. It is possibly one of the biggest stressors in society today.

One needs to realize how defining oneself in terms of job title and university degree is limiting. In particular after a few years’ experience, our personal identity is much more complex and full; and it involves both personal and professional elements. We need definitely to find other ways of expressing our complete identity. It could be through our own creations or on social media.

Transforming the way we express our identity is a mandatory skill for the Collaborative Age.

How To Create Emotional Connection in a Community

In this great blog post ‘What do people need to feel part of your community?‘, Pamela Slim shares how to create actual emotional connection within a group of people. And she certainly has great experience doing just this.

Her recipe includes:

Feeling safe
Feeling seen
Feeling heard
Feeling honored

One aspect that struck me particularly is her statement “I want to stress that “safe” doesn’t have to imply “always comfortable.” Some of the very best community building involves real discomfort as people explore beliefs and perceptions, challenge assumptions and explore differences.” Actually, I do strongly believe that going together through uncomfortable situations is a great way to create emotional connection – and that’s a ploy commonly used for example, for team-building events.

How do you treat the community you are trying to build? Is there any of these elements missing?

How To Thrive In a World Where Power is Concentrated

While concentration of power is quite unavoidable in today’s complex world, we still can thrive in this world. Of course, those institutions that have the power and the wealth might not have the best intentions and we should not be too naive. But thanks to the newly available technology of the Fourth Revolution, there is an intrinsic counter-power to this situation.

anybody can publish to the world, for free (or close to it),
we can coordinate, re-group and communicate globally, for free (or close to it),
it is possible to start a business for a lot less money than before, and have instantaneously a global footprint,
we can travel anywhere for much cheaper than anytime before (compared to the average earning power).

The sheer size of those actors has also an interesting drawback, that can be increasingly observed: they don’t know what to do with their money. Share buy-backs are more and more widespread, a sure sign that those organizations don’t know what to invest their resources in. This is great news because it has probably never been easier to get money to fund new initiatives and ventures. And these resources will necessarily flow into much smaller setups, that are nimble enough to take advantage of the opportunities of today’s world.

One can also argue that these huge organizations are also struggling with controlling themselves and what they are actually doing.

Hence although this might be a problem on some aspects, I do not find the concentration of power we can observe to be a major impediment of taking initiative and developing new stuff, on the contrary.

How to Deal With the Concept of Average in a Complex World

In a complex system, wide distributions rule. The more complex, the wider the distribution and in particular the ‘long tail’ of the distribution. As our world becomes more and more complex, the concept of average disappears.

We know for some time that extreme events shape our environment: storms, floods, earthquakes, tsunamis have instant transformation power, changing our environment more in a few minutes than changes brought slowly in decades. It is the same when it comes to financial crisis or bankruptcies of companies. A sudden, extreme event challenges the normal.

Increased complexity also creates the increasing disparity in wealth and revenue, making the concept of average or median a much less useful concept. In fact as this entertaining article ‘On Average‘ shows, the concept of average might have been useful but has had adverse consequences before ergonomics was invented to allow to adapt our immediate environment to our personal particulars. The anecdote of the consequences of the concept on the death rate of military pilots is particularly enlightening.

Average is not useful concept. Let’s ditch it to favor more realistic concepts. Average was a concept of the Industrial Age. Today, large spreads and change through extremes is the norm.

How Today is The Best Time to Be Alive

Today is the best time to be around for a human – that’s a least what the statistics show. A large number of statistics are for example given in this Spectator article ‘Why can’t we see that we’re living in a golden age?‘ : wealth, life expectancy, violence rate, all indicators trend favroably (on average).

life_expectancy — Life expectancy evolution in the world, showing improvements for all countries (click for link to larger version)

And indeed in spite of the increase of the world population and all the problems that plague humanity, it looks like it has never been a best time to be alive for a human, male or female.

Of course, the world changes fast and it is difficult to know what to do to thrive, because the practices from yesterday are not the one that will make successful tomorrow. Of course, inequality tends to increase as a result of connectivity and increased complexity. Still humanity has never been as protected and wealthy.

Still we are also very fearful and believe doomsayers. That might be because “We’re hardwired not to believe this. We’ve evolved to be suspicious and fretful: fear and worry are tools for survival. The hunters and gatherers who survived sudden storms and predators were the ones who had a tendency to scan the horizon for new threats, rather than sit back and enjoy the view. They passed their stress genes on to us. That is why we find stories about things going wrong far more interesting than stories about things going right. It’s why bad news sells, and newspapers are full of it.”

Look at evidence and enjoy the ride. And we have never had so much spare time and communication capability to enjoy it anyway!

How Cities May Remain Stable Social Structures Through the Collaborative Age

A post on Quartz raises the issue: ‘Megacities, not nations, are the world’s dominant, enduring social structures‘. It is true that cities in general have shown substantial reisilience to history and changes in political regimes and economic activity.

Will that remain the same through the Fourth Revolution into the Collaborative Age? There is a lot of speech on the possibilities of working remotely from the countryside. Mobility increases constantly. We don’t need so much to meet face to face to exchange and share ideas.

At the same time, cities remain unique melting pots of ideas, meeting points for connection and have quite a unique scale factor for enabling face-to-face meetings and teamwork with minimum time loss and cost. They are also linked to long distance transportation hubs which are not going to disappear soon. I believe that teamwork will remain a decisive factor for value production in the future, therefore cities will probably remain a fixture. However as they will drain ever increasing territories they may become fewer and further between.

How to Scale Organizations Dealing with Complexity

Following up on General McChrystal‘s book ‘Team of Teams‘, the unique feature of the book is how it describes practically how to scale organizations that deal with complexity.

In large complex projects I am used to see co-located teams of 150 to 200 people maximum that can manage huge projects. General McChrystal describes how he scaled a similar organization to deal with thousands of contributors and dozens of departments/agencies in a context of high complexity – war in Iraq.

The recipe is quite simple however it requires a lot of leadership consistency. The co-located team is limited to 100-150 people which is the maximum practically feasible. It mixes all departments and there is no secrecy within the team – all information is shared. Graphical displays show the situation as it unfolds. Exchanges between departments are organized to help people understand others’ approaches and points of view.

The result of setting up and running such an organization can be astounding in reactivity and nimbleness. There is not reason why it could not be adapted to civilian organizations. My guess is that the organization of the future will probably be some evolution of this model.

How People Buy More Experiences and Less Things

It seems that there is a trend for people to increasingly buy experience and not just things as part of their luxury expenditures.

“In a 2014 report the Boston Consulting Group says that nearly $1 trillion of the $1.8 trillion spent on “luxuries” in 2013 was spent on experiences — 55 percent.” quotes Valeria Maltoni in her excellent post ‘Seeking Experiences Where the Product is a Better Self‘

“When we buy experiences, those purchases make us happier than when we buy things,” says Joseph Pine, the co-author of The Experience Economy. “Some large part of that trillion is luxury transformations—people looking to recharge, revitalize or to improve well-being in some way.”

And it is true that in the quest for the meaningful, minimalism and avoidance of excessive tangible ‘stuff’ is quite a trend.

What about you? Do you increasingly buy and offer experiences instead of things?

What the Facebook News Controversy Teaches Us About Impartiality

The recent controversy on Facebook impartiality is particularly interesting as more than half of the younger generations (under 35) appear to rely on Facebook as a source of news (link to the Pew study here). Some do almost exclusively. This teaches us that there are still quite a few human curators behind the algorithms and that we should not underestimate social networks influence.

The facts: in May, a controversy erupted in the US on the partiality of Facebook’s curation on politic topics (see here and here). It even led to a congress hearing and investigation. Facebook denied any wrongdoing and committed to change its process to ensure even better impartiality.

This event has highlighted again (see our post ‘How humans intervene in Internet’s workings‘) that even the social networks that have the most advanced algorithms rely heavily on human curation and intervention, and sometimes increasingly so. Of course human curation will introduce a bias, and this is long known and acknowledged in journalism (newspapers have typically a certain political stand, as do newspaper editors). The fact that Facebook expects to remain impartial in that context goes counter this natural trend and is an interesting statement where human cogs in its processes are considered mechanistically.

According to Reuters, the world’s largest social media network said in a blogpost that “changes include clearer guidelines for human editors on the Trending Topics team, more training to emphasize avoiding ideological or political basis, and more robust review procedures“.

I am not sure that it is possible for a social network that includes curation and edition to remain impartial. In any case it is an issue that too many people rely on a single source of information. Will there be in the future the creation of several competing social networks each with its own acknowledged political stand and editor?

How Narcissism Increases in Our Society

Narcissism – the pursuit of gratification from vanity or egotistic admiration of one’s own attributes, is on the rise, and it has been for some time.

And that’s not just an observation of the rate of selfies and Facebook posts about the great things happening to us. It is a serious observation from the average score of people taking the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI) test.

It is an interesting test to take, for example on this NPI link, at a personal level.

An interesting statistics is shared by the test group, which is the average narcissism score. It increases regularly such as in this study of US undergraduates.

The NPI average increases since the 1990s

As we can see, this observation of an increase in narcissism goes back to at least the 1990s. While the series stops in 2005, practical observation would suggest this has continued until now.

I believe this is quite an important observation as it reveals quite an important feature of our societies which has probably been accelerated by the availability of social networks and the possibility to filter out one’s life to keep only the exciting part.

So, how narcissistic are you?

How Our Face Has Become MetaData

A few (scary) experiments show that today, we are not anonymous anymore in a crowd. Our face can easily be recognized thanks to the technology, in particular the technology used by social networks that pushes us to identify the face of friends.

A Russian photography student has carried out an experiment to show how easy it is to identify complete strangers.Twenty-one-year-old Egor Tsvetkov took photos of people in public places and then tracked them down on the Russian social media site VKontakte using a facial recognition app. The experiment ‘Your Face Is Big Data’ was published online (link in Russian). It is quite impressive how the results turned out to be!

We can expect this technology to be quite available, so we’re probably not anonymous any more when we are walking around or taking the tube. Something to take into account in our daily life… and our privacy settings on our favorite social networks!

How New Technology Might Already Change our Brain

New technology allows us to perform automatically some tasks that would have required significant cognitive power. It may even lead to changes in our brain functions as we fail to exercise some of them.

One of the best examples is the GPS. Driving with the GPS, following instructions without having the overview of what we are doing, diminishes our navigation capabilities at least in terms of training. This is even noted in this Bloomberg article: ‘How GPS Came to Be—and How It May Be Altering Our Brains‘.

I have remarked quite often that people that use GPS systematically become utterly lost geographically if they happen not to have the small device, and can’t even guess in which part of town they are. And as GPS is now ubiquitous in our phones, we always have it close-by. But at the end, we lose our sense of orientation and our capability to map out out surroundings and build a consistent picture of geography.

It might not be a big hurdle (until the day where the GPS won’t work!) but keeping a good sense of orientation is, I believe, a good capability to have. Maybe someday we’ll have remediation practice – in any case, our technology has started to transform us.

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