“Progress is impossible without change and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything” – George B. Shaw. The more I speak about the Fourth Revolution, the more I consult in the field of organizational change, the more I find this quote incredibly deep and powerful.
change your mind, change the world
Most changes need to start with a mindset change. Many failures are caused by the failure to change one’s mindset. Of course you can change your environment, your processes, your organization. But if you don’t change your mindset, or rather more precisely, your mind perspective, change will not be successful. You will fail, and slowly become sour, frustrated and angry.
Only by changing your mind first, by changing your identity, your view of the world, will you be able to really change your life, and to change the world.
So, how do we change our mind perspective? It requires both openness and deep introspection.
Openness so as to apprehend the reality of what surrounds us without all the filters that we usually impose to our perception
Deep introspection to find the right way to change – our own way, the way that excites us deeply and fits with our inner self
It is an intensely personal quest, and it can be made difficult by how our environment might tend to push us back into our previous mind perspective. It requires solitude and mindfulness. Yet going through this exercise is a necessary preliminary. All the rest of the change is just a consequence of the mindset change: see the world differently, you will act differently.
It is amazing how this is applicable both for individuals but also for organizations: organization’s culture and mindset needs first to change for the organization to really change. Change programs that do not consider this as a preliminary will fail.
So, when do you start stopping for while, open your mind and seek your passion?
In this follow-up post on the topic of complexity (read “How the Fourth Revolution brings us from the complicated to the complex” if you’ve missed it), we’ll examine in the world that surrounds us, how complex systems behave, to take some lessons of what we can expect of the Collaborative Age.
Do you know that erosion does not happen regularly across time? In the blink of an eye geologically speaking, major events, floods, storms, change the shape of the rivers thousand of times more than years of normal flow!
Colorado river canyon: how do you think erosion really works?
99% of the shaping of the Grand Canyon probably happened during short, abnormal events. The gradual shaping of the canyon, sand grain after sand grain, is a myth!
When I was studying hydraulics some years (ahem…) ago I learnt this lesson which seemed strange to me at the time. Today as I know more about complex systems it is not surprising anymore, it is normal. But it really shows how our perception of the world around us has been shaped by the Industrial Age.
Industrial Age mindset wanted us to believe that changes happened progressively. A famous controversy among naturalists in the first half of the 19th century opposed the ‘catastrophists‘ to the ‘gradualists‘. Consistent with the Industrial Age mindset of a mechanistic, predictable world, the ‘gradualists’ won finally and their view imposed to the world for the next 150 years or so. (Funny enough, earlier wisdom was rather ‘catastrophist‘ (eg the Bible)). It is only recently that science re-discovered that the evolution of species, the erosion of rivers, and many other natural phenomenons do not evolve progressively over time. There are some climax periods where evolution happens thousand times faster, separated by relatively quiet periods.
The theory of complex systems, and in particular all the works on risk, show that variability in most systems follow a ‘long tail’: the probability of events significatively out of normal range is much higher than we think conventionally. And when they happen, they change the situation dramatically. In fact, they shape the entire system, dwarfing all the progressive change that could have happened before.
What can we take from all this science and knowledge?
It is not because a situation, an organization, a market etc seems stable for some time that a major event will not happen that will reshape completely the surrounding world
we always underestimate the possibility of a significant freak event (and underestimate also its power to change our environment)
Freak events will happen sooner or later. They will change completely the balance of a situation we thought was stable and secure. The reality is that freak events are those that drive the changes in our world, not progressive ‘gradual’ change.
Would you agree that the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001, the tsunami in Japan 2011, etc are freak events that were totally outside the normal? And that they shaped the world more than any other event in the previous decade?
We need to be ready for freak events, because they create the real change. Not only that: we need to be ready to grab the opportunity.
Discover next week in the last post of the series how the successful K.E.E.N. can grab the opportunities offered by freak events.
Complex is not the same as complicated. Industrial Age got us used to the complicated mindset. Collaborative Age is the the era of complexity. And here lies a fundamental difference overlooked and misunderstood by so many people.
This is the first of a series of 3 posts about complexity and how we can thrive through it.
Watch gears: complicated but not complex!
A watch is very complicated, as are numerous appliances we are using everyday. Yet, its outcome is highly predictable (it’s a watch after all!). We can rely on it to run precisely for days or months in a row. Each component fits nicely, mechanically in a single system. Each component does not have the choice of doing whatever it wants. It is driven by the system to perform reliable its single function.
While in a complex system is also an intricate buildup of many interrelated contributors, there is one main difference: each contributor has the choice, follows its own interest.
Afghanistan: example of a complex, unpredictable system
Like the situation in Afghanistan, the outcome is difficult to predict, more difficult even to steer in the expected direction if we are one of the players.
Science added another category of complex systems: some purely mathematical systems that include retro-action and multiple iteration loops can have results that become unpredictable (chaotic systems), even if the initial mathematical formula was simple. It is the case of weather and other important systems around us (ref the famous analogy of the butterfly flying in Brazil that can create a storm in the US).
The Industrial Age viewed the world as complicated; it meant that there was supposed to be a way to understand how it worked and there after, predict where it was going. As such, predictability of your behavior and your results in the vast system of production was expected; in exchange there was some predictability in your career development, based on your formal education.
Alas the mechanistic view of the Industrial Age did not resist to reality. We now know that the world is undoubtedly complex. Totally interconnected. And as such, forever unpredictable. Forever impossible to divide in small parts, cogs, that would nicely fit together to create a perfect, predictable world.
Of course, the ever accelerating development of connectivity in the past decades has dramatically increase the complexity of today’s world. We are all now fully inter-dependent, part of a large complex system.
We know now that we are in a complex world, and that just being a cog following instructions is not a sustainable way to success. That major unexpected events are drawing the picture of the world much more powerfully than the succession of daily small changes. That an idea in remote Afghanistan can create a storm in New-York and change forever the lives of billions of people.
Let go of the mindset of the Industrial Age. The world is not complicated, it is just complex!
In the following weekly posts, we’ll examine some properties of complex systems, before finally discussing what we can really do today to thrive in a complex system. Check out next week the followup post on complexity!
This is the end of another institution that started with the Industrial Age: news spread a few days ago that the Encyclopedia Britannica stopped its printed edition, having sold only a few thousand copies per year in the last years. It will continue to make its database available online.
encyclopedia britannica 1st edition - 1768
Let’s do some fun maths. In 244 years of existence, around 7 million copies of the precious encyclopedia were sold (or, on average 30,000 per year). During that time approximately 17 billion people have been born and became adults (see for example this article of Carl Haub, the specialist in historical demography). Thus on average, there was one copy of the encyclopedia available for 2,500 people.
In 2008 Wikipedia saw 680 million visitors in the year and aims at reaching this level every month by 2015. 14% of internet users (14% of 2 billion = 280 million users) go on the Wikipedia site according to Alexa.com. That’s one person for 22 living people, or probably approximately one person for 15 adults.
Crowd-knowledge is here, orders of magnitude more powerful than centralized edition of a paper encyclopedia. In less than a decade, the institution of the encyclopedia has been toppled and made obsolete.
The Fourth Revolution also creates revenue opportunities for the citizens of emerging countries in more surprising ways than being service providers for commodity services that still require creativity and intellectual initiative.
A game parlor in China
According to a World Bank report, the market of gaming-for-hire, where people get hired to play games and earn rewards or virtual money on behalf of richer players living in developed countries, was worth… 3 billion $ in 2009. In China and India alone, more than 100,000 “game laborers” would be playing day-in, day-out to be able to earn precious tokens, levels and virtual treasures to resell them to richer players that don’t want or cannot put in the time!
Two Google-related university teachers have just done a mindblowing experiment that overturns conventional university education.
We know that the Fourth Revolution will overturn most institutions we’ve inherited from the Industrial Age. The latest to date: Universities.
It’s still only a precursor, still it gives us the direction for what will happen in the next 10-20 years: the first online course from Stanford University, a course on Artificial Intelligence, has been given late 2011. The mindblowing detail of this experiment that ended up being a revolution is given in this post by Eric Salmon, “Udacity and the future of online universities“. Unexpectedly, more than 160,000 students from all over the world registered and the professors had to setup a dedicated website!. Extracts from the post:
“There were more students in his course from Lithuania alone than there are students at Stanford altogether. There were students in Afghanistan, exfiltrating war zones to grab an hour of connectivity to finish the homework assignments. There were single mothers keeping the faith and staying with the course even as their families were being hit by tragedy. And when it finished, thousands of students around the world were educated and inspired. Some 248 of them, in total, got a perfect score: they never got a single question wrong, over the entire course of the class. All 248 took the course online; not one was enrolled at Stanford”
WOW. WOW! And it’s not finished:
“The physical class at Stanford, which dwindled from 200 students to 30 students because the online course was more intimate and better at teaching than the real-world course on which it was based”
Read the rest of this mindblowing post! And right now, these teachers have decided to create a new online university, Udacity, which will propose soon online courses on a number of subjects, IT-related mainly.
So, what is really new? For some years already, large universities have made their courses accessible on the internet (see for example, Stanford Engineering Everywhere or MIT opencourseware); by this we mean the course material.
An institution under siege: University; here, Stanford campus
However, the lectures have never been given online, nor have students be graded or have taken exams exactly like if they were in the class. Sure it just got tried – and it works!
As many Industrial Age institutions, the classical university institution is now under siege. Sure, there will be a few more years before we’ll see macroscopic effects: this experiment has been done by IT-savvy professors who also work at Google, for IT-savvy students; it will take time before this spreads to the entire faculty and all subject matters.
Still, the university institution is in question and will soon be exactly in the same conundrum like physical newspapers or the publishing industry are today. Their economic model will become unstable because it is funded by big Industrial Age corporations that seek to produce commoditized degree-holders (see the blog post on “Leave alone the academic executive programs. Go and learn real life leadership! It’s cheaper and better!“). The logic of geographical concentration of university to enhance communication is obsolete as we have just seen demonstrated. So, be ready to see big changes. And Google is at the forefront of the new online university (the two teachers of that particular course are also working at Google), so that we can expect that Google will see the interest of reinventing the business model, leveraging lower fees to a much larger number of students.
Should the current universities not reinvent themselves in time (which is probable in view of the fate of most institutions when comes a fundamental revolution), other players will replace them, and they will disappear in the heap of Industrial Age institutions that did not manage to transform themselves…
If you want more in-depth analysis, more comments on this revolution in Alex Tabarrok’s blog: The Coming Education Revolution (August 2011) and Udacity (January 2012).
It is very simple: after opening an account for free, I put in a one-page description / specification of the job. After 72h I had already 15 to 20 proposals from contractors. Each of them had a link to their previous work so that I could see whether I liked the style; they also proposed a price. Contractors were from everywhere: Europe, USA, South America etc…
After a few days I finally made my choice for a contractor located in Argentina. After two weeks of collaborative work online (the graphic designer sending rough sketches, me commenting), I finally got what I needed, 5 characters to illustrate my book.
Project Soft Power characters
Elance.com secures the payment and delivery process and gives a lot of information on the contractor’s ratings on previous jobs, the comments of the previous clients etc, which is really helpful in selecting the contractor you need. Actually it appears there are many companies from emerging countries that seem to derive much of their income from platforms like Elance.com.
You are following this blog, so I know you understand what the Fourth Revolution is. Still even I can’t stop to be amazed at what we can do today with a computer and an internet access. Do you realize, I hired in less than one week a contractor who worked for me from the other side of the planet, in Buenos Aires, Argentina and it was like he was working close-by!
As I just arrived in Singapore I don’t have the network of local contractors yet. It is at a point where I won’t even look for a graphic designer or a translator locally! I’ll just go online and hire on the global market!
No profession is really protected anymore from the Fourth Revolution. Borders don’t really matter much.
And consider your own market, your opportunity field: it is worldwide, wherever you live. Did you realize it? When will you leverage on it?
PS: Wonder what these characters mean? I will share with you in a future post the five roles of Project Soft Power!
Today, for relatively simple services (graphic design, translation, virtual assistant, all sorts of website development etc) that can almost be called commodity services, the market is… worldwide. You can hire easily, from your desk, a service provider at the end of the world, North America, India or South America.. it does not really matter. Did you realize it?
Not convinced? Visit Elance or Freelance.com to see how those platforms propose to connect buyers and service providers, and what are all the possible jobs that can be done. Like E-Bay, these companies provide a platform that secures transactions, and they allow to examine the track record of buyers and sellers and the evaluations by previous users. Service providers can also show some samples of their work.
Moreover, these services allow talented artists and individuals from emerging countries to take part to the worldwide market and benefit directly from the economy. Clearly that puts also pressure on the prices that can be proposed by service providers from developed countries. This is a fact today: for commodity services, the market is worldwide and that won’t change. The only way to charge higher prices is differentiation and creating longer term, emotional connection with the buyer. And career or business development can also be considered from home, using only internet to sell your services!
I remember how in Europe, a proposed regulation by the European Commission to allow the liberalization of services across borders was a big political issue in the middle of the last decade. Well, it looks that this debate has been made completely obsolete by the Fourth Revolution, at least for those services that don’t need physical work or presence.
In the next post I will describe my experience in using Elance, recruiting a… Argentinian (!) designer to produce the characters I needed for my next book, “Project Soft Power”.
Stay tuned! The Fourth Revolution has not finished to astonish you!
It became a social media event, using a twitter account that broadcast the card’s balance live.
Here’s an extract of the card balance curve.
Jonathan's Card refills
See, people almost never refill before it goes to zero. But then they refill with a large amount.
Would we tend to use FREE until there is no more, but then be generous as we are in fact participating to a social event?
This pattern is often identical when people that know each other share a single resource and need to refill sometimes. What is astonishing here is that it happened with people who did not know each other. Yet they must have had a sufficiently strong emotional connection through their participation to the social network.
It just shows that communities that are emotionally connected over social networks behave like communities that are face-to-face in real life. Over considerable distances, community behavior develops. Social networks really break the distance factor!
After the tremendous success of the first Kindle promotion of the Fourth Revolution, to celebrate this new year – the Chinese new year, the Fourth Revolution book on Kindle is free for another 48 hours only!
This prescient quote by a visionary author is directly applicable to the Fourth Revolution, a major advance in civilization. The storm of the Fourth Revolution is upon us. Society will undergo a tremendous change. Are you ready?
Do you believe things change quickly? Facebook, today, represents the same size than the entire internet network in 2004.
Facebook-net
And remember that Facebook service was launched in… February 2004!
The internet itself has bloated dozens of times.
17 years ago, when I graduated, email was still a rare thing reserved to companies and universities.
Let’s just put that in perspective: in less than 20 years our way of communicating has changed dramatically. In less than 7 years internet has become social. Many people could not think about communicating without Facebook and Twitter.
The tools are here. The social and political consequences might take some more time. Still, they are inevitable. The Fourth Revolution is here.
