Institutions and Revolutions | The Fourth Revolution Blog

How Information Systems Are Increasingly Set Up by Everybody but the IT Department

“Kill that bulky IT department!”. That could be the war cry of many organizations these days as the influence and size of IT departments tend to diminish significantly. As a result, they don’t have the same regulation impact on investment in Information Technologies.

Two related changes are driving this transformation:

the move to the Cloud (and thus the lesser need for infrastructure setup and maintenance), and
the related fact that other departments can now spend directly for systems without any infrastructure infrastructure needs and thus without any prior authorization or even knowledge by the IT department

According to Gartner, 38% of IT spend in companies is now out of the hands of the IT departments and this tends to increase significantly over time [reference: attended speech from CapGemini CEO in Oct 2016]. The marketing department in particular for BtoC industries, becomes a major client for information services.

This decentralisation has many positives. In particular it removes the centralizing controlling power of the CIO which was oftentimes excessive, even taking strategic decisions without proper understanding of the business impact. It allows specialist trades to implement the tools that they really require. On the other hand it opens the door to issues related to data consistency, possibilities of business intelligence, and all sorts of security-related issues for company data. Actual control of the expenditure may also become an issue as more and more cloud services are Opex based instead of being visible, centrally authorized Capex.

In any case, for us involved in providing specialist software (cf my company ProjectAppServices), it certainly means that all our marketing effort should be directly with the user, and the IT department is just an annoyance to avoid as much as possible.

Are you fully aware of this change? If your IT department still decides everything you are going into the wall. Time to change!

How ‘Luddite’ and ‘Protected Market’ Resistance to Change Add Up

There are basically 2 types of resistance to social and technical change: the ‘luddite resistance’ and the ‘protected market’ resistance. And in the case of the Fourth Revolution, both add up when it comes to resisting change.

luddites — Luddites in action in the 19th century

The ‘Luddite resistance’ refers to the Luddite, those early 19th century frame breakers, qualified weaver artisans that broke the new weaving machines that only required unqualified labor. Those workers feared for the end of their trade, being replaced by machines.
The ‘protected market’ resistance refers to all those markets that for one reason or the other, have been protected (generally in the name of the common good to manage scarce resources or to enhance certain types of services) but the reason for this protection disappears with the Fourth Revolution. In general, many scarce services and goods are now becoming abundant.

As an example, taxi services generally form a protected market with regulated prices and numbers, in the name of public service. Drivers fear to be replaced by machines (the luddite resistance) and at the same time, the reason for market protection disappears as ride-booking apps replace taxi hailing.

This resistance to change analysis framework is actually quite useful to analyse all sorts of resistance to change even in organizations today. People fear that their job will be replaced by machines or information systems, and at the same time the reason for the protection and regulation of certain trades disappears.

In your case, what is the proportion of ‘luddite resistance’ and of ‘protected market resistance’?

How Excessive Complication Might be the Cause of Collapse of Empires and Companies

An analysis on the causes of collapse of empires quoted in the post ‘Why Complex Business Models Collapse’ is an interesting start for some considerations of complexity.

The premise is that the intrinsic complexity and sophistication of the empire or organization increases over time up to a point where additional complexity is detrimental, in particular in the face of sudden external change. The institution is then unable to cope with the change. “When societies fail to respond to reduced circumstances through orderly downsizing, it isn’t because they don’t want to, it’s because they can’t.”

I find this model intriguing because from my perspective, complexity rather increases reactivity and adaptation. I think the author mistaken complication and complexity. Adding layers of bureaucracy in a futile attempt at control is complication. Properly maintained complexity is rather an antidote at inflexibility. We should certainly fight organizational complication (and its representative, bureaucracy) but rather welcome complexity.

How Shamanism and Schizophrenia Relate – What is a Mental Illness?

The paper is a bit long but worth reading: how a child suffering from schizophrenia found solace in his relationship with an African Shaman, discovering how his condition brought him closer to this special role. To read in Nautilus, ‘A Mental Disease by Any Other Name‘.

“Both shamans and schizophrenic people believe they have magical abilities, hear voices, and have out-of-body experiences.”

I find this document exciting because it shows that conditions that we judge as debilitating and requiring treatment in our society may have been rather considered a strange but valuable gift in other societies.

The document also shows how belonging to a community can help control symptoms associated with these conditions.

Let me stretch this observation to our framework of the Fourth Revolution. Our usual categorization of mental illnesses stems from the Industrial Revolution. What if it would be significantly upset by the Fourth Revolution. Moving into the Collaborative Age we might find that some of these conditions are gifts in certain situations too.

What New Institutions Are Needed for The New World of Work

The new world of work – sometimes dismissively called ‘Uber-ized’ – will require new institutions. This post from Quartz ‘How to make an Uber-ized economy work in America‘ provides some interesting clues.

Becoming a contractor is an increasing trend: “[Independent contractors] share of total employment is rising, from 9% to almost 16% between 2005 and 2015. And it’s not just low-skill, uber-drivers turning to contract work out of desperation—the increase in alternative work spans all education levels. Americans with a college degree are most likely to be contract workers, and this group saw the biggest gains. Contingent work has also become more common across a variety of industries and occupations.”

One of the main issues with the fact that we will become increasingly contractors is to manage the risk of a sudden loss of revenue; and more generally, the ups and downs of income depending on how often we provide our services. This is a problem I am managing in my consulting company, voluntarily keeping a substantial share of earnings in the company to cope with periods with lower utilization. De facto, the company is being used as an income insurance buffer. It might not be the most efficient way, but it works.

The Quartz post proposes that the state could setup a ‘wage insurance’ against substantial drop of income to cover those extreme events that can really derail one’s life. This could be a very useful institution for the Collaborative Age, together with some sort of collective health and life insurance.

What other institutions could we think of for the Collaborative Age?

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.

Why It Is The End of Driving Services

It is soon the end of driver services such as taxi and limos, and those currently employed there should start looking for other occupations.

The self-driving car is just at the corner, and when society will realize that they are indeed much safer than human-driven cars, there will certainly be suddenly a tipping point.

Of course that will be felt like an unjust revolution by those employed in the driving trade, but let’s face it, that is clearly the direction of the world. Convenience, safety and efficiency will create the change. And this will impact also insurance companies, car manufacturing companies (because of the impact on car ownership) and a lot of related services (including the profitable industry of traffic speeding fines!).

I may even live to see human driving forbidden by insurance on public roads because of its dangerous nature.

It will be a disaster for those involved in the trade, and generally a great progress. They’s better anticipate it.

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?

Why there is Debate Between Content Moderation and Free Speech

Moderation on social networks is an essential feature. In an excellent essay on the Verge ‘The secret rules of the internet – The murky history of moderation, and how it’s shaping the future of free speech‘, the relation to free speech is discussed. “As law professor Jeffrey Rosen first said many years ago of Facebook, these platforms have “more power in determining who can speak and who can be heard around the globe than any Supreme Court justice, any king or any president.'”

The testimonies about content moderation are quite breathtaking, and the decisions whether to keep some videos that have shocking content but are important from the political perspective (like the murder of people during demonstrations) an example of tough decisions to make.

And because “The stakes of moderation can be immense. As of last summer, social media platforms — predominantly Facebook — accounted for 43 percent of all traffic to major news sites. Nearly two-thirds of Facebook and Twitter users access their news through their feeds“, this determines what people will ultimately see from the world.

Of course before there was journalism, a limited number of sources and effective censorship by governments. What has changed is that it is now privately handled and not susceptible to democratic control. I would anticipate that at some stage, guidelines might be defined by governments (e.g. related to anti terror campaigns) but at the moment it is an issue to be kept in mind.

Why Emotions Remain So Important in Organizations

Google is generally trying to use data to drive its performance. But it has found itself unable to predict the performance of teams based on data only. Actually it was more about emotional interactions. This research – the Aristotle project – is explained in a very interesting NYT article, ‘What Google Learned from Its Quest for the Perfect Team‘.

“Project Aristotle is a reminder that when companies try to optimize everything, it’s sometimes easy to forget that success is often built on experiences — like emotional interactions and complicated conversations and discussions of who we want to be and how our teammates make us feel — that can’t really be optimized.”

As Hugh MacLeod (Gapingvoid) puts it, “Why is business so hard? Simply put, we think it is due to a lack of humanity. Our obsession with data is conflated with a belief that emotion in business is bad: Data and emotion are incompatible, so we have a bias against connecting emotion to business and we work in sterile workplaces that do not value our humanity.

But what happens, when the data support the paradox that it is our emotional connections that create better, more efficient, smarter work?”

Let’s develop emotional connection to create more efficient work.

Why Thriving Requires Us to Overcome Our Mind Patterns Sometimes

Our mind patterns have been built to benefit our survival. To thrive we need to be able overcome those patterns.

Our mind patterns and instinctive reactions are immensely useful – they allow us to react instantly to threats, and generally stick to proven survival reactions in our day-to-day life.

At the same time, they imprison and limit us in considering new situations, or finding new ways to look at common situations. We need to be able to overcome those patterns to thrive.

This is of course dangerous and better done in a situation where we are somewhat protected, and possibly not all the time.

The dilemma is, those mind patterns need to be overcome to find new value, and we still need them to cover our survival most of the time. The capability to thrive in this dilemma is the mark of the innovator.

Break your patterns consciously sometime and reap the value. When do you start?

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