Revise your knowledge of the Fourth Revolution by watching this entertaining video by Don Tapscott that covers most of the basics (Don Tapscott is the author of Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything and Macrowikinomics: New Solutions for a Connected Planet). It even speaks of the transition between Agricultural, Industrial and Collaborative Age!
I like how he considers the younger generation to be ‘natives’ of the collaborative Age while he is only an explorer!
This summer for the first time the ‘summer hit’ in the US came out of nowhere. That’s “Call me maybe” an infectious song (250 million views on YouTube). Well, that’s not exactly true: it came out of YouTube and social networks. The story is counted in this very interesting NYT article which I recommend to read.
This song became a hit through a YouTube-twitter infection. And it is only with regret that the radio stations went on to play the title after a few weeks. For whom actually? It seems the young generation listen to music (for free) on YouTube anyway. Artists make money through public appearances and other means; not any more through broadcasting their songs. That’s a fact.
It goes to show how the traditional music industry is completely overtaken. It does not master the broadcasting channels that are important to the young people. It is the end of that industry as we knew it in the last decades.
And it is the beginning of viral hits. Funny videos, cool songs… Stay tuned! The Fourth Revolution has toppled the music industry and it is not the last institution that will go!
PS – listen to the song it’s really viral!
Following our posts on the Fourth Revolution being the realm of the exponential, this nice blog by Paul Graham (a famous Venture Capitalist investor), “Black Swan Farming”, brings closer the related issue of the fact that today, success is extremely rare – and extremely successful. And that as much as the exponential is not intuitive to us, this situation also escapes our common sense. It makes it in particular difficult to take action and put our stakes on the right candidates.
In the case of startups this expresses itself by the fact that only a very, very, very small handful of startups will make it really, really, really big (1,000x the initial investment or more); and they dwarf almost every other investment – they dwarf hundreds of other investments which either outright fail, or just live on with a nice but limited growth.
This is difficult enough to apprehend; where to invest in is equally counter-intuitive: it is mainly in ideas that seem at first view utterly pointless, and that are not popular.
The important idea in this blog is the fact that the situation is so counter-intuitive that we would need in fact to suspend all kind of intuition about whether a startup could be successful to increase our chances of final success – by taking more risk and capturing more of these freak Black Swans.
We already live in a world which is counter-intuitive through exponential and freak events – we absolutely need to change our frames of mind to thrive in the Fourth Revolution. What are you doing to change from the linear vision of the Industrial Age?
The Fourth Revolution is the era of the exponential – whereas the Industrial Age was the era of linearity. And that changes everything in the way we live our life:
The problem is that we are not geared to feel intuitively the power of the exponential. It is very difficult to seize how fast it can grow. Do you remember the tale of the wise man that told the King who wanted to thank him: “only put a grain of rice on the first square of a chess board, then on the next square put two, then on the next square put four, then double for each square until the end of the chess board…” The King never realized that at the end of the 64 squares the quantity of rice needed would vastly exceed his available supply – and the world’s supply and even more!
This explains why so many people today have difficulty understanding what happens in the world. In their linear Industrial Age mindset, they can’t grab how the exponential is changing our lives faster and deeper than ever before.
Are you ready for a world full of exponential change?
Thanks to Mitch Joel and his post on “The Era of Exponential Marketing” – a specific area where most people also don’t realize we are in for exponential growth of product sales- for the inspiration.
The great picture of the rice on the checkboard is by Paul Starkey on Flickr.
As I was travelling in France a few weeks ago I was repeatedly struck by how Old Industrial Age cliches die hard – and in particular in ‘developed’ countries.
Trade unions claim that the country should be re-industrialized (poster on the right I saw on a building). That would be fine if they did not mean rebuilt large manufacturing complexes.
Authorities and traffic forecasters still believe that people take their leave all together when the factories close (which is of course, less and less true – no wonder traffic predictions are less and less accurate!).
In the midst of the crisis, the government plays with the idea of creating large manufacturing giants, the key to wealth and prosperity. Is it really?
I have two main objections to this:
Diving into the Fourth Revolution is not easy. It is not easy at a personal level because instead of waiting for someone to give instructions we need to find out how to create value for others. It requires to change one’s mindset.
But it is not by dreaming of rebuilding smoking stacks of large manufacturing plants that the economy of developed countries will be saved. It is by releasing the creativity potential of the people!
One of the best papers I read on that lately was from the Economist, “les Miserables“, or how Europe consistently discourages entrepreneurs (published July 2012).
Do you really release the potential of your people when they get a life sentence when they fail (see the graphic on the average duration of bankruptcy)? Do you think they will take the risk to fail – a risk inherent to any creation?
Stop dreaming about going back in time to the Industrial Age. Step forward into the Fourth Revolution or you’re doomed.
Allow people to fail. Allow people to be flexible with their life. Create the infrastructures and institutions that will free people while giving them a guaranteed minimum safety net at a reasonable price.
The opportunity is now. Crisis are time where things can change, where things will shift. The current crisis might be the one opportunity for developed country to do the transition. Don’t miss it.
Digital manufacturing, also known as 3-D printing (see our April 2011 post on 3D printing), is a technology that is evolving into an industrial production technology. It now allows to produce objects that are far more evolved and cheaper that those that could be produced by conventional manufacturing processes – and one customized piece at a time.
Not convinced? Just watch this 3 minutes video. It says it all and demonstrates one of the most complex and customized products that is manufactured: a prosthetic leg. Enjoy!
Here is the link if you can’t see the video above. Enjoy!
Following on our post on the “The Creativity Crisis Does Not Exist“, to be fair, creativity has a drawback though.
And Hugh McLeod (subscribe for free to receive a daily Gapingvoid cartoon and thought) captures it fantastically as usual in this cartoon.
Yep, to be creative you need to be some kind of a lone wolf. And choose not to be sheep. Are you really ready for it? The point of Hugh McLeod is very well made – you need to choose one or the other.
At any time, in any society, only a few people are ready for being lone wolves. They will be lonely, sometimes hungry, but they will change the world.
Will you be the sheep of the wolf? Time to choose!
Creativity has become a key concern. As measured by some standards our creativity seems to declibe. Yet globally creation has never been so buoyant. How can that be?
Following our blog post “the World Wants to Keep us Stupid“, a comment linked to this 2010 Newsweek paper “The Creativity Crisis”. Studies describe in this paper have measured that while IQ tends to increase from generation to generation, creativity tends to diminish since 1990 in the US – and in particular in younger children. When this paper came out it led to a number of reactions. The new Collaborative Age is the age of creativity! Is America losing the game? Are Western countries losing the game? Is the world losing the game?
There is one big logic failure here however: creativity can be learnt and taught. It can be developed quickly through the proper exercise. It can be also unlearnt in our society like shown in this fantastic example quoted from the Creativity at Work Blog:
In 1968, George Land distributed among 1,600 5-year-olds a creativity test used by NASA to select innovative engineers and scientists. He re-tested the same children at 10 years of age, and again at 15 years of age.
Test results amongst 5 year olds: 98%
Test results amongst 10 year olds: 30%
Test results amongst 15 year olds: 12%
Same test given to 280,000 adults: 2%
If you don’t understand why that happens in a conventional Industrial Age world, look at the cartoon!
So the result of tests on young children anyway does not predict their creativity as adults. It might be true that the modern kid might be enticed to do activities like video games and watching TV that do not develop as much creativity as figuring out how to play games with almost nothing – and I make sure my kids have moments where they need to be creative.
Yet the most important is also to make sure we train our creativity muscles during our entire life. And even atrophied creativity muscles can be trained back to be fit!
The Fourth Revolution shows us everyday how our collective creativity is increasing every day, both through the mating of ideas from the web, and the increasing emphasis on creativity as a key success factor. We can learn creativity. We need to practice creativity.
There is no creativity crisis. The only crisis is that the world might not be ready to welcome the wave of creativity that will change our societies beyond recognition.
Thanks to Julie Pigdon for the comment and reference that led to this post.
The modern hospital is a Health Factory, and Institution of the Industrial Age. We seek there maximum effect of scale for producing a product called “health”. It is centralized, and even more so that the increasing complexity of modern healthcare, coupled with easier transportation, leads to a concentration of facilities and the disappearance of smaller, more local healthcare centers.
Hospitals are there to solve situations where the sickness or the trauma is already declared. Without asking its opinion to the patient, because doctors have the knowledge of what needs to be done, it brings people into a system designed to be as efficient as possible in healing them. Tools designed by science – efficient medicines- are used.
How will healthcare transform through the Fourth Revolution? Like in other institutions of the Industrial Age, many of its foundations will be shaken and buckle:
Where the Industrial Age concentrated health production in a factory called an hospital, the Fourth Revolution will again decentralize the production of health in the palm of everyone’s hand.
The medical world is one of the most conservative. Will they realize that this wave of change is coming to them before the hospital institution succumbs to the crushing forces of the Fourth Revolution?
Yes, what you are doing in this virtual world of social networks increasingly impacts what happens to you in your real life – because of what people – anybody- can know from your virtual life at the touch of a screen.
And I am not just speaking about dating or meeting with people that you’ve met on a social network. Not even about vendors collecting your clicks and maybe even your location to propose to you products that are ideally suited to your habits and your current situation (which is a bit scary but theoretically should be very practical).
Do you know there is a lot of controversy regarding Klout. It is a service that supposedly measures your online influence. Of course, there is a bit of controversy about how that’s measured (but then the tool is still “beta”). However the biggest issue is how this unique number that measures influence can be used in real life.
This astonishing paper in Wired shows that even if you don’t know what it is, your Klout score might actually already change your life: it might be looked up by prospective employers or even the hotel clerk (to check if you could really damage their reputation). So you’d maybe better want to know what it is!
A good summary of the issue of the public availability of these indicators can be found in this paper by Jason Falls “The Problems with Social Profiling”.
Of course such a subject unleashes passion: someone computes a score that is publicly available and measures your power of influence or annoyance. This is much more pervading than the recent trend of prospective employers to ask candidates to show them their Facebook page.
The debate on personal data on the internet is now superseded by the debate on those abstract indicators that measure your overall activity – without any hint as to what your activity is. And because these data are available to everyone, increasingly, social network and real life network spaces become intermeshed.
We still need to learn how to benefit from that opportunity while avoiding the main risks. The quest will be long and bumpy. It is unavoidable. The Fourth Revolution is expanding.
For those of you who have been interested by the adventure of Amanda Palmer on Kickstarter (see How Crowdfunding redefines the future of Creation for million of artists), I just had a glimpse of her campaign’s result which just closed end May.
Have a look at Amanda’s kickstarter page. She had an objective to raise 100,000$.
Ready?…
Sure?…
Are you seated?…
She raised 1,192,793$. In less than 2 months.
She’ll do her compelling project, probably much more and most certainly we’ll hear about her in the future with some new, amazing, awesome projects.
No label, no publisher (which she dumped two years ago). Just the power of the crowd. People voted with their wallets.
Let’s look at the stats: 24,883 backers contributed an average of 48$ each. Out of them 11,100 contributed less than 5$. 20,500 contributed less than 25$. Ouch! Isn’t that democracy? Don’t you have 5$ to spend to support an artist you love??
I’m sure you want to change the world too. When will you leverage the power of the crowd for your project, and stop waiting for somebody else to decide whether what you are doing is right?
In this final post on the topic of complexity (read “How the Fourth Revolution brings us from the complicated to the complex” and “What we can learn from complex systems to understand today’s world” if you’ve missed them), we take some lessons of how we can be prepared and take advantage of the freak events that shape the world.
Now we know that freak events are really those that shape our world. Events that come in unpredictably, with a strength which we had underestimated, and change forever the lives of millions of people. They shape society much more powerfully than any progressive change.
These are times of crisis, where the previous equilibrium is pushed out of balance, outside its naturally stabilizing protections. During some time that particular part of the world struggles to retrieve balance, finally reaching a different equilibrium, start of another period of relative stability.
As our world inter-connectivity grows, the impact of a freak event happening somewhere in the world spreads.
Last year the IT, automotive industries got struck worldwide by freak floods in Thailand; and many industries got struck by the Japanese tsunami – the nuclear industry worldwide, for example, will never be the same again. Are those events more frequent? Probably not. But their impact on the economy and on people around the world is now much greater.
How can the successful K.E.E.N. thrive in such a world? Yes, more surely than most people that try to keep the previous established order of things. A few principles apply, at first some basic defensive principles (risk management):
More importantly the K.E.E.N. sees opportunities in these times of crisis:
The successful K.E.E.N. knows that freak events will happen, and when they happen, he looks at them with the mindset of opportunity. The mindset makes all the difference. Even if almost wiped-out himself by the event, the K.E.E.N. will rebounce.
Welcome to the new complex world where taking the opportunity of freak events will be the driver of your success. Welcome to the Fourth Revolution!
What opportunities do you see in the current crisis and will you see in the next freak event that will touch you? Is your network and your lifestyle ready to take these opportunities?
