complexity | The Fourth Revolution Blog

How Psychology Explains Why Most Projects Fail Miserably

The statistics of project failure are abysmal (two-third of projects fail – either outright, or by not providing the expected benefits). In addition, what is remarkable is that when they fail, they generally fail miserably – it is not just some statistical distribution due to the world uncertainties.

Psychology might offer an explanation for that interesting phenomenon, which I have actually observed in action in real projects. The prospect theory, mentioned and explained by Daniel Kahneman in the bestseller “Thinking, Fast and Slow“, shows that we tend to have some biases when deciding in an uncertain context.

A summary of prospect theory showing those situations where we tend to be excessively risk-adverse or risk-seeking

What occupies us in this instance is the upper right corner: when there is a high risk of significant losses, we tend to take more risk than would be reasonable in the hope of being able to recoup our losses.

So, project managers, facing situations where the prospective outcome of their project is degrading fast, with a high probability of significant loss, would tend to take the risk of an (improbable) recovery rather than cut their losses. And in reality, it is a phenomenon I observe again and again in real project life.

As Daniel Kahneman observes, “This is where people who face very bad options take desperate gambles, accepting a high probability of making things worse in exchange for a small hope of avoiding a large loss. Risk taking of this kind often turns manageable failures into disasters.”

Make sure you can keep managing the situation. Learn to cut your losses instead of hoping for an uncertain recovery!

How Success Can’t Happen Without Both Will And Luck

As the saying says, success is due to talent in some part, and also to luck. And great success is just a bit more of talent, and a great chunk of additional luck. We need to recognize that luck is a key ingredient to what we become.

It is tough to accept that our destiny is shaped in a large part by luck. We would like to think that it is just our talent and our efforts – our will. The role of luck stems directly from the complexity of the world around us – and its unpredictability.

And indeed there is a large part of modern auto-determination thinking that suggests that you can shape your destiny the way you want. In a certain way, Coaching relies on this assumption by enabling people to act in the direction they choose. Thus, will can shape your destiny, to a certain point.

And will and luck are not independent. On the luck side, there also ways to attract more of it, like for example maintaining a healthy and diverse network that will expose you to more opportunities – something that you do consciously.

The balance between will and luck, how they fight and synergize, is not easy to define. If either ingredient is missing, we won’t reach our expectations. The balance is difficult to find and might depend on the circumstances. In any case, make sure part of your will is devoted to increase your luck!

Why Internal Stability is So Important in an Unpredictable World

Following up on an idea from Robert Branche in ‘Les Radeaux de Feu’ (only available in French), living organisms have organized themselves in the face of the inevitable increase in unpredictability of the world by increasingly developing internal stability.

penguins — Penguins maintain internal stability (homeostasis) independently from the external conditions – which can be very unpredictable

This is the case very visibly in mammals: they are clearly the dominant species, they have resisted to many cataclysms, and they are at the same time the animals that maintain the most stable internal environment with a constant internal temperature, glucose levels etc. This is called homeostasis.

Robert Branche takes this observation in the realm of organizations, and concludes that homeostasis is a necessary condition to thrive in an ever more unpredictable world: internal stability is necessary to properly manage external changes. It is important to maintain that internal stability and not let oneself be too much driven by external conditions.

This comes with a warning however – according to Robert, “the existence of internal order and rules must not reduce uncertainty, but make its development and acceptance easier“. The organization should not disconnect itself from reality for the sake of maintaining its internal stability.

Still I find this idea very valid that the most successful organisms and organizations thrive in an evermore unpredictable world by maintaining internal stability, which gives them the capability to respond instead of just reacting. How stable is your organization internally in the face of external changes?

Why You Should be Unreasonable (Sometimes)

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man” – George Bernard Shaw.

man in front of icebreaker I stumbled upon that video of an pretty unreasonable man seen tracing the way in front of an icebreaker. (It turns out it is a piece of art by Guido van der Werve.). I find that it is an excellent image of what an unreasonable man can do. He traces the way and behind comes the rest of the world.

And it comes also to link the quote from George Bernard Shaw with the concept of Art. Art is being unreasonable and creating progress. It is possible to create Art in most instances and most areas. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man – the artist?

Link to the making of the film by Guido van der Werve, and an extract of the film (with the sound of the ice broken by the icebreaker!) on Youtube.

Why the Fourth Revolution will Promote Meritocracy

I strongly encourage you to take a few minutes to go through this video/ transcript of a MIT research assistant about research on the impact of network connection on whether societies are meritocratic (people get rewarded in proportion of their contribution) or topocratic (intermediaries get rewarded, not the contributors). [The text on the page is the transcript of the video if you prefer reading].

A network model shows that as the number of connections increase, the system becomes increasingly meritocratic (click on the image for a large version)

Basically research shows that the more connected the network is, the more it becomes meritocratic. A very basic model suggests that if everybody is connected to 150 people on average (which is approximately the case on Facebook), the network is meritocratic only on a section of 22,000 people in your close network. The network is still topocratic (enhances the intermediaries’ value) at the size of a country. Now if your number of connections is larger, the size of the society subset which will be meritocratic will increase dramatically and you will receive increasingly more rewards from your contribution.

As the Fourth Revolution expands and the inter-connectivity of our world increases substantially, we can expect our societies to become more and more meritocratic even if it will still take time to avoid intermediaries at a country or at global level. What a better demonstration that the Fourth Revolution will bring tremendous changes to our benefit?

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.”

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.

His 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.

What is True Mastery?

“True mastery comes from discovering the ‘simplicity’ on the other side of complexity” – Dan Ward.

Dan Ward is an interesting phenomenon – senior purchaser with the US Air Force he is also a prolific writer on the topic of complexity. The Simplicity Cycle is a great piece of thought – here is the link to the Simplicity Cycle Paper or alternatively, the Simplicity Cycle slideshow.

He has an interesting take on the fact that development of a great item needs to initially start with increasing complexity – but that after some stage it needs to migrate to the search for simplicity – and that otherwise goodness decreases with increasing complexity.

“Perfection [in design] is achieved not when there is something more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to take away” – Eric Raymond. A great definition of the Graal of design and of the evolution of any system. And a great definition Mastery: one who knows how to simplify the complex can increase significantly its impact on the world!

Hat tip to Tony Farrow for the link to Dan Ward’s work.

Why Perfectionism Kills Schedules; and Reasonableness Saves Them

“Perfectionism kills schedules; reasonableness saves them” is a quote from Gerald M Weinberg in ‘More Secrets of Consulting‘. I find that this is pretty true from any project, be it personal or professional, be it small or large.

It is always a constant battle to keep people from the decreasing yields of additional analysis, workflow definition etc to keep to the 80% of information that is really needed to take the right decision and move on.

It is possibly the fear to take a decision that drives most of us to be excessively perfectionist in gathering all possible data, when the issue and the possible solution is already visible for a long time. And this problem does not improve in our age of Big Data and possibilities of unending data mining!

Fight perfectionism and excessive analysis. Be reasonable, overcome your fear, and act.

How to Overcome the Lies we all tell Ourselves

“It turns out that we lie to ourselves about three things: we view ourselves in implausibly positive ways, we think we have far more control over our lives than we actually do, and we believe that the future will be better than the evidence of the present can possibly justify.” – Tom Asacker in a Business of Belief.

This statement has been proven repeatedly by many studies – like for example, studies that show that 90% of the population believe they are better-than-average drivers. We also generally think we have more control on our future than we really have, forgetting how unpredictable external events can shape our lives and change significantly our destinies – as we often discover looking at how our past life unfolded.

The issue is then, how to get people to still take appropriate action and have the right behaviors while their beliefs do not represent reality? How can we overcome these wrong beliefs?

Beyond making sure people become aware that their view of the world is skewed, the only way to move people is to create emotion (same root!) and desire so that these beliefs can be overcome. Rational explanations backed up by statistics won’t work. Create instead those strong emotions related to fear of loss or emotions related to positive expectations. Speaking to the heart, taking into account these wrong beliefs, is the only way to overcome these artifacts of the mind.

When you come across a situation where these lies are visibly expressed and impede proper action by the person, speak to the Heart!

Why we Should Not Try to Understand the World Too Much

One of the most profound quotes I have stumbled upon recently is from Umberto Eco: “I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.”

Isn’t that profound wisdom about living in a complex world? Because a complex world is by nature unpredictable, it is not useful to try to theorize what will happen or what lies below. Still, because of our pattern-seeking build, we tend to try to do so. While it is useful to do that at a small scale, it is ineffective to try to do it at a large scale.

Theorizing the world will never work. And it is becoming worst as the world becomes more complex every day, with increased interconnections between an increasing number of people.

Umberto Eco goes further by ascribing a lot of the harm around us to this attempt to theorize and make the world predictable. And indeed it is often this attempt that draws crowds to believe in certain things.

It is natural and reassuring to believe that the world is predictable and can be theorized. Unfortunately that’s impossible. This is scary and full of opportunities at the same time. Above all let’s not try to find the underlying truth, let’s let go and the world will be a better place.

Why we Need to Become Used to Failing

Following up from our previous post “Why We Should Stop Treating Our Organizations Like Machines“, let us consider for a moment the consequence of looking at organizations like living systems: Darwinian evolution.

frog catches prey — Another victim of natural evolution!

Darwin has shown that progress and adaptation in living systems come from the evolution of species, whereby the most adapted individuals transmit their genes more effectively than others. In actual terms, in nature, there are a lot of fatal failures. Those who don’t make it through their lifecycle can’t reproduce. Many adapted creatures don’t make it either, possibly through tough luck.

Natural evolution is all about lots of failures and only a few successes. It is tough. That is scary thought for our societies and for us as individuals. Yet successful companies of the internet know how to nurture many initiatives even if a majority will turn out to be failures. Many other organizations don’t know how to do that, leading to people not taking initiatives at all.

The only way to be successful in the Collaborative Age is to expect failure, or at least lack of success, in the majority of our endeavors. This requires a significant mind-shift. Are you ready for it?

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