Category: complexity

Why We Need to Restore Productivity Through Collaboration

Productivity is the basis of wealth. Yet after decades of sustained growth in the Industrial Age, its growth has been progressively slowing down since the 1970s, and is almost plateauing today. This causes economic stagnation.

In a very interesting TED talk, Yves Morieux explains how this crisis is due to a change in the concept of efficiency – because value has shifted, due to the Fourth Revolution.

Yves Morieux explains that the traditional tenets of the corporation (clarity, measurement, accountability) are obsolete and have to be replaced by collaboration. “To cooperate is not a super effort, it is how you allocate your effort. It is to take a risk, because you sacrifice the ultimate protection granted by objectively measurable individual performance. It is to make a super difference in the performance of others, with whom we are compared”.

“Clarity, accountability, measurement were OK when the world was simpler. But business has become much more complex”. And thus the processes and effort around clarity, measurement and accountability and the innumerable processes around these issues have become a liability instead of an advantage.

Collaboration is the key to effectiveness in a complex world. Remove the rules around individual measurement and focus on getting the maximum out of collaboration!

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Why We Should be Learners Rather Than Experts

“In times of change, the Learners will inherit the world while the Knowers will remain well-prepared for a world that no longer exists.” writes Eric Hoffer. Just right – and as we are now constantly in a time of change, this should apply universally.

Eric Hoffer‘Experts’ or ‘Knowers’ derive their views from an analysis of the past. Furthermore, in instances where the past is complex such as in history or economics, they add a layer of rationalization on these observations (such as correlations or implied causations).

The thing is, the future is not going to be a repeat of the past. And even more as time tends to accelerate. Even if is useful to study history to grab how random events create huge consequences, it can be disastrous to use this knowledge in the field of forecasting.

The observers, the ‘learners’, are those that will keep an open mind to new developments and will more quickly adapt. Be a Learner. Don’t seek to be a Knower.

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Why are we working the more the higher in the organization? The work-time paradox

Today, the higher people are in organizations, and the higher paid they are, the more they are expected to work. That is very much the opposite of the situation one century ago: it was rather the lower classes that had to work long hours to gain a meager living while the upper classes took advantage of a life of leisure. And in the meantime, productivity gains should have rather diminished the average work time, while automation should have reduced human effort.

overworked
Overworked in the bureaucracy?

Why this paradox? Is it representative of a societal shift? Where will it stop (when one hears for example about young interns in banks dying from overwork !?)?

The New-Yorker published an interesting column on this topic ‘You Really Don’t Need To Work So Much‘ following some recent controversies about work conditions in Collaborative Age companies such as Amazon.

The column I find does not give convincing explanations of the paradox. Some arguments are probably valid (such as ‘If you’re busy you seem important’ and the fact that the modern large organization does create a lot of occupation that diminishes dramatically the efficiency, not to mention the effectiveness). One can think also about the fact that the current organizational structures are not designed to tackle the increasing complexity of the world, and this creates huge work to try to catch up the increasing gap. And yes, it is probably possible to be as effective and putting less hours at work, removing some bureaucracy.

It seems to me that the fact that the higher one is in an organization, the more he/she has to work is a remnant of the pyramidal organization of the industrial age. This should disappear progressively with the Collaborative Age. However the increase of inequality counteracts this movement as many people have to work more to earn what they expect. And freelance people end up working more than employees in general, because they also need to do marketing and administration tasks they can’t easily delegate.

Please comment if you have a good explanation for this paradox and your views on its evolution!

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How We Increasingly Discover the Importance of the Vagus Nerve

I am struck to see in more and more papers and articles mention of the “vagus nerve“, a lesser known nervous system that runs parallel to the best known spinal system and concentrates on linking our internal organs to the brain.

vagus_nerve_overviewThis comes in parallel to an increasing awareness of the importance of “gut feelings” in decision-making. Gut feelings are mainly transmitted by the vagus nerve system. See for example this article: ‘Science says your “gut feeling” isn’t a metaphor‘ (which even goes to link our guts’ microbial condition to our brain capabilities).

In general it appears that a lot of deep emotional reactions are triggered or conveyed by the vagus nerve and that it plays an essential role in our overall behavior. This of course goes against some theories about the role of certain other nerves and brain parts. We still have a lot to learn on our bodies!

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How Social Ratings Determine Our Choices

In a well-known but scary experiment on the music market, Duncan Watts and a team of Princeton researchers showed in 2006 that the popularity of songs was only very partially related to their appeal and quality – most of it is influenced by our peers’ rating.

Ratings: What drives our choices?
Ratings: What drives our choices?

In this experiment, people were either able to see or not the ratings from others. This created very significant differences in behavior. When rating was present, there was a big “luck premium”: whoever had some good ratings first would emerge as the uncontested winner at the end.

Hence, funny articles such as ‘Is Justin Timberlake a Product of Cumulative Advantage?‘. As mentioned in this paper, “The reason is that when people tend to like what other people like, differences in popularity are subject to what is called “cumulative advantage,” or the “rich get richer” effect. This means that if one object happens to be slightly more popular than another at just the right point, it will tend to become more popular still. As a result, even tiny, random fluctuations can blow up, generating potentially enormous long-run differences among even indistinguishable competitors — a phenomenon that is similar in some ways to the famous “butterfly effect” from chaos theory.” We come back to one of the main characteristics of the Collaborative Age.

There is no way to predict the popularity of your creation. But early support and excellent ratings from your tribe might be a good place to start!

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Why You Always Need to Look for the Real Underlying Problem

It is now well known in consulting that the issue which you are called in to solve is rarely the real issue at stake. Most of the time, there is some underlying problem which is much more serious and that needs to be addressed heads on.

Do you see the problem? If you don't see the lion look at the problem from further!
Do you see the problem? If you don’t see the lion look at the problem from further!

This issue is explained for example in Peter Block’s ‘Flawless consulting‘ book.

And quite often as consultants, as we are not infallible, we start addressing some surface problem first before realizing what the main issue really is.

Also, the real issue is often more difficult to tackle because it is generally a much deeper issue related to governance and people’s behavior.

When called in to resolve an issue, always take a deep breath and some time to figure out whether there would not be a deeper underlying problem that would better need to be resolved. It is generally the case, and your intervention will be much more powerful.

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How We Have Increased Dramatically our Feedback to all Services We Use

Following up on our post ‘How Social Ratings Determine Our Choices‘, let’s add how much more often we are asked to rate, and we do rate services.

Ratings have also been introduced for toilet service at Singapore airport!
Ratings have also been introduced for toilet service at Singapore airport!

I am amazed at how often I am prompted to give my feedback now. In all situations: when using a website or a service on internet; when visiting a hotel on the reservation platform; when downloading or using an app; when reading a book on my Kindle; and even when visiting the toilet at the airport!

And when we don’t do it consciously, the machine does infer some ratings: for example, how much and quick I read my book on Kindle certainly creates some rating in Amazon.

When we put this situation together with the fact that this forces the system to behave like a complex systems, reinforcing the popularity of the popular services and diminishing greatly the popularity to the others, we can see how our world is increasingly transforming in all spaces to a “winner takes all” situation, or that everything will be increasingly governed by the famous long tail distribution.

Welcome to the Collaborative Age!

By the way: how do you rate this post? 🙂

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How to Improve the Effectiveness of Complex Problem-Solving Teams

We’ve already established in this blog that an effective team is the best way to tackle complexity. There appears to be one additional condition: the team must be complete when it meets to resolve a situation.

problem solving teamAccording to  Michael Marquardt in the book ‘Optimizing the Power of Action Learning’, “Putnam (2000) notes that the most complex problems can be solved only by a group that has developed a strong social bonding. Therefore, it is much better that the group meets fewer times when everyone is present than more times when one or more of the members may be absent”

I have observed that when people are missing it certainly influences the effectiveness of the process. This warning also implies that problem-solving teams be of a limited size so as to make it workable.

Increase definitely the effectiveness of complex problem solving by insisting on the attendance of everybody in the problem-solving team!

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How to Easily Check If Data from Complex Systems is Tampered With

Benford’s law is a great way to quickly check if data from complex systems (obeying typically to a power law distribution over several orders of magnitude) has been tampered with.

An illustration of Benford's law
An illustration of Benford’s law

According to this law, the first number of the dataset must follow a logarithmic law, and there must be much more ‘1’s than ‘9’s. This is contrary to intuition, and when people generate fake numbers they will tend to spread them more evenly.

In an interesting Guardian article ‘The special trick that helps identify dodgy stats’, studies are mentioned that showed that when applied to the macroeconomic data from countries, this simple test showed that Greece’s was quite questionable!

When questioning a dataset next time, use Benford’s law to easily check whether the data could be suspicious!

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How the Fourth Revolution Definitely Made Reductionism Obsolete

Antireductionism “advocates that not all properties of a system can be explained in terms of its constituent parts and their interactions” [Wikipedia]. It stands opposed to reductionism, the approach typical of the Industrial Age, which considered that the behavior of entire systems can be explained completely by a description of their individual constituent parts and their interactions.

In the 18th century people thought animals could be described as a mechanical apparatus
In the 18th century people thought animals could be described as a mechanical apparatus

Already the philosophers of Enlightment struggled a bit with reductionism that was contradicting our free will. Still, the mechanistic view of reality dominated science and our understanding of the world until far into the 20th century.

Today in many areas such as chaos, systems biology, evolutionary economics, and network theory, we know that complex, unpredictable behavior arises from large collections of simple components.

“By the mid-twentieth century, many scientists realized that such phenomena cannot be pigeonholed into any single discipline but require an interdisciplinary understanding based on scientific foundations that have not yet been invented. Several attempts at building those foundations include (among others) the fields of cybernetics, synergetics, systems science, and, more recently, the science of complex systems.” writes Melanie Mitchell in ‘Complexity: A Guided Tour‘.

The study of complex systems is an emerging and still very incomplete science. It is the hallmark of the Collaborative Age.

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Why Basic Motor Skills Are So Hard To Learn by Robots

Moravec’s paradox says that “contrary to traditional assumptions, high-level reasoning requires very little computation, but low-level sensorimotor skills require enormous computational resources“. In other words, our unconscious capabilities are much more difficult to implement than our high level, conscious abilities.

humanoid robot falling
A semi-autonomous robot having balance problems at the 2015 DARPA challenge

As Wikipedia explains, “One possible explanation of the paradox, offered by Moravec, is based on evolution. All human skills are implemented biologically, using machinery designed by the process of natural selection. In the course of their evolution, natural selection has tended to preserve design improvements and optimizations. The older a skill is, the more time natural selection has had to improve the design. Abstract thought developed only very recently, and consequently, we should not expect its implementation to be particularly efficient“.

So while computers became better at chess than humans a few years ago, getting a robot to reproduce our moves will still require some years, as shown in this video from the 2015 DARPA humanoid robot challenge.

There is not reason why we won’t be able to built fully balanced robots in a few years (it took a decade from the first DARPA autonomous driving vehicle challenge to have fully functioning prototypes on the roads).

Yet it is really amazing to realize that those deeply engrained bodily functions we take for granted are the most difficult to reproduce! – whereas we think they are rather low-level functions.

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Why Avoid the Organizational Comfort Zone Retreat Reaction

In the past months I have observed astonishing reactions from various leaders and organizations to an unexpected economical situation. When faced with a scary and stressful situation, it is amazing how thoroughly people tend to revert to their comfort zone – where they had been successful in the first place. The problem is that this comfort zone might be obsolete! This has dramatic impact on the organizations and individuals.

running back to the comfort zone
Running back into the comfort zone!

I am quite active in the Oil & Gas industry which has suffered a shock since a bit more than 6 months with the sudden drop of the oil price. Some organizations’ leadership have literally freaked out, with the result that they have undone what they had been building for the last few years in just one movement, fleeing back to their traditional business model – the one that made them successful in the first place. Of course, some organizations had taken some measured risk to expand and grow in the last years, but it is really astonishing how people revert to their basic nature when they freak out!

Going back to their comfort zone means often, reverting to business models and operating modes that are thought to be safe while they are in fact obsolete. Where a crisis should rather force to ask tough questions about significant changes in the business model, possible new industry structure and new alliances, those organizations that freak out retreat into their comfort zone and close the door, waiting for the storm to pass.

This creates a most depressing effect on the morale of the top people in the organization, who were at the forefront of building a sustainable new model. When they are not sacked they generally leave quickly.

It is in tough times that the quality of the skipper shows. Retreating into one’s former comfort zone is certainly not the best reaction. Yet it is amazing how leaders sometimes react, with dire consequences on their organizations on the long run.

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