Institutions and Revolutions | The Fourth Revolution Blog

The Nonsense of Copyright Life Extensions

Copyright is an institution of the Industrial Age that will be transformed deeply by the Fourth Revolution. Yet, while the availability of material on the internet that can be downloaded and reused for free is booming, while the cost of patent and copyright infringements lawsuits is exploding, this questions has not yet found the right answer.

Lock and Copyright sign — The Copyright institution, locking away troves of opportunities

Actually in the last 50 years the law has been constantly amended in the wrong direction, as mentioned for example in this post by Alex Tabarrok “Copyright unbalanced“: the duration of the protection has been increased from 28 years after a voluntary deposit to 95 years after publication (whether or not the copyright protection would have been sought).

This lengthening of copyright protection is at odds with the acceleration of our daily life and the much quicker obsolescence of content. Copyright protection duration should shrink, not be extended. These extensions are but the reflection of seeking undue benefits.

In the changes to the Copyright institution in the Collaborative Age, 10 years protection should be more than enough. Specific copyrights with different timeframes could also be implemented (1 month for news, 1 year for position papers…). Less developed countries where copyright rights are not defended strongly are benefiting of this situation to be more creative and to develop their own products. When will politicians and diplomats seriously tackle this issue which impedes our economies to grow and develop?

How we Need to Reinvent our Relationship with Nature

During the all the previous Ages, exploitation of nature was a central economic activity. This often meant killing ‘pests’ – when it was not to exploit wildlife directly (whales, fur animals…). Today, forests and wildlife come back with a vengeance!

Wolf, wildlife invades our life — What will we do with wildlife as it comes back?

This excellent paper of the Wall Street Journal “America Gone Wild” describes the situation in the US: wildlife booms and starts to impact severely the modern american way of life. In Europe, a generation of countryside hobby game hunters who were traditionally managing wildlife is also disappearing, opening the way to a more professional management of game and wildlife.

It is great to see that nature comes back and that the environment does improve in developed countries. Forests grow. Wildlife develops. Still as we are moving into the Collaborative Age we need to reinvent wildlife management to satisfy our wish of a dynamic wildlife and still manage it so that it stays within reasonable bounds that we can accommodate. This will need more professional, subsidized game management, probably involving professional hunters. A new institution, probably.

There will be some soul searching on that subject in the next years and decades; and there will certainly be some instances of excessive wildlife presence that will need to be curbed.

More importantly we need to invent a new relationship with nature. Let not the fear of the wolf so ingrained in our European minds will come back to haunt us! Not any more a confrontational or exploiting relationship, but a synergistic relationship that will make us thrive on Earth. Are you ready to contribute?

How to Respond to the Question: “Who Are You To Do This?”

As I try new things outside what people would expect to be my normal occupation (as defined by my diplomas, certificates and list of positions), a question I often get is “Who are you to do this?.. do that?..”.

Distinguished Professor teaching students — Do you need to be certified, chartered, PhD to teach effectively?

At first I was a bit disturbed by the question. I did not have the certificate to train! I did not have the diploma to facilitate! I am not a certified consultant (yes, certification programs also exist for consulting!). My answer now is: “I am a passionate human being”.

Of course there are some areas for which I needed to have additional education. I am a Certified Professional Coach because I needed a structured program to get the competencies it entails. But for many other activities I have no formal paper to certify my competency. Still I manage to develop my brand and I get more and more clients.

As soon as you’ll try new things outside what non-imaginative people expect from you, based on your standard Industrial Age profile, you’ll get the question: “Who are you to do this, to do that?”. Don’t feel threatened. Know that you do that because you bring value to others and to yourself.

Don’t hesitate. The new world will be created outside the certifications, diplomas, courses and standards. The people that changed the world did that outside the usual framework and values of their time.

Go for it. If you feel you are the one that can do it, do it. For yourself. For the others.

Why Competence is the Enemy of Change, and What to Do

“Competence is the enemy of change“, says Seth Godin in his school transformation manifesto “Stop Stealing Dreams” (free download). He continues by writing “Competent people resist change. Why? Because change threatens to make them less competent. And competent people like being competent. That’s who they are, and sometimes that’s all they’ve got. No wonder they’re not in a hurry to rock the boat“.

Let’s take a moment to ponder the depth of these words and how this effect really impacts our world. How it slows down the necessary transformation of the world.

Competence is somehow linked to people’s identity as professionals. Fundamental transformations such as the Fourth Revolution threatens many professionals in their own identity. They cannot any more assert the value of their knowledge (painstakingly built through courses and checked through standard evaluations and certificates). In deep societal transformations, there are no standard evaluations and certificates. There is no reference. Competency cannot measured any more. Actual competency might be adaptability and agility, and not fixed knowledge. And so those that define their worth through ‘competence’ resist any change. They feel on the edge of a chasm of unknown, without any fixed marker.

How can we overcome this major hurdle to any disruptive change? Probably by putting less emphasis as a society on formal competence and knowledge. That will be hard, as it has been ingrained by decades of Industrial Age where your worth was measured by your certificates and past positions.

How much do you feel that formal competence defines yourself? How much are you ready to let it go as an identity and instead, identify yourself as an experimenter of life, a human being?

Economists fail because they can’t apprehend complexity

Economists notoriously fail to explain the world in which we live. And their forecasting capabilities are highly unreliable. Why is that? Our take is that there is a fundamental impossibility for economists to apprehend the real world’s complexity. And so, it is going to get even worse as the world complexity increases!

representation of complexity — A complex system: an early representation of Internet

Economists try to fit the economy in simple rules. They do that at different scales: macro-economy; micro-economy; case studies. One of the major hypothesis is that of the rational individual, i.e. that individual’s decision making is driven by rational decisions based on improving one’s economical condition.

We know for a long time that it is a simplified view of people’s actual motivation. It has become clearer in the last few decades with the emergence of the concept of “leadership” (why would you want “leadership” in the economists’ world when compensation should be enough?). Repeated crisis have shown the limits of all rational econometric models – and that “Black Swan” events happen frequently – events that upend conventional thinking based on careful analysis of past statistical data.

What are economists good for then? Simply giving some comfort to politicians? Driving the economy in times of normality?

Economics is still a recent discipline. If it is to become really useful it needs to apprehend complexity – how complex systems work, how they can become unstable and unpredictable. And then only will economics be truly be able to take the central role in governance that it seeks for a long time.

How Economists can’t explain Collaboration

Economists are known not to agree on explanation of past events, and to be a disaster when it comes to predicting what will happen in the economy.

Among their feats, economists still can’t explain how Wikipedia, for example, works. As quoted by Alex Tabarrok in his post “Shared Creation”, they still can’t figure out what is the effect of such low transaction costs in the spontaneous assembly of people performing for free a seemingly so valuable service to Humankind.

Because non monetary motivation is more important than any kind of economic exchange in this case, the usual tools of the economists based on the “economically rational individual” fail completely. And indeed – Wikipedia lives only through the voluntarily contributions of millions of people. Still, it is now an institution that is supported by many and has become so indispensable in our lives.

As Alex Tabarrok mentions, “Economists thought that Wikipedia couldn’t work because of problems of motivation but what turned out to matter most was not motivation but transaction costs. With 7 billion people and low transaction costs what other forms of shared creation become possible?”

That transaction costs are now zero changes completely the logic of the exchange of value. A lot of what we are doing during the day is not any more just motivated by economic rationality. It makes the reason why so many organizations and institutions exist completely obsolete. Will economists become also an extinct profession in the Fourth Revolution?

How Education Accreditation Impedes Change towards Excellence

One institution of the Late Industrial Age is university and, in general, education and training accreditation. National (governmental) or professional bodies decide what the education program should be and expect the university’s or the school’s program to be fully aligned.

Accreditation Seal — Is your education accredited? By whom?

And behold those education institutions that would not fit in the mold! They take the risk of losing the right to use certain nationally and internationally recognized titles for their diplomas of achievements, and thus to lose the interest of prospective students.

Of course on one hand, accreditation guarantees a minimum quality. But on the other hand, what a formidable hurdle to educational experiments!

A university in Malaysia tried to implement a new, original education system with many advantages to prepare students to work life (as it included many work-related projects and close relationship with industry). Discussing with the university founder, he described how painful it had been to have to fit finally within a standard education framework determined by bureaucrats – for fear of losing the right to use the normal university grades and titles.

Accreditation is beneficial at the beginning when a profession first forms. Like any institution is soon impedes change and tries to defend itself against the external world. As everything becomes global, standardization of accreditation is another significant issue. The only remedy is to create a new education brand that will be stronger in terms of recognition than the conventional accredited grades and diplomas.

This new, strong brand of an education adapted to the Fourth Revolution will appear eventually. The format of delivery education will change, needs to change with the Fourth Revolution, online education, and the need to foster improved emotional intelligence in the new generations to come. Accreditation programs will slow this evolution – but like any institution will finally have to give way.

Must Read: “Makers” the Manufacturing Revolution

Chris Anderson, the author of “Free” and “The Long Tail“, and editor at Wired, has produced another great book to help us understand what is happening today: “Makers“. A must read for your holidays!

“The past ten years have been about discovering new ways to create, invent and work together on the Web. The next ten years will be about applying those lessons to the real world”

Chris Anderson makes the case of manufacturing coming into the age of collaboration with 3D printing and other manufacturing techniques allowing to produce economically small series of objects (a few to a few thousands). This will change the face of manufacturing. Exactly like ‘Print on Demand’ is changing the publishing industry, ‘Produce on Demand’ starts to change manufacturing.

Chris Anderson makes the case that because the logic of large commodities production is becoming less prevalent, manufacturing will return closed to where the consumer are. In any case, distances are abolished as your 3D plans can be sent to any suppliers to be produced in any quantities. Design is important, manufacturing in any quantity becomes a commodity.

Welcome to the Collaborative Age of tangible things. Read this book to understand the seismic wave that is changing manufacturing forever, right now under our eyes. It might take a decade to bring our industry upside down, but it will certainly transform it completely. The old Industrial Age manufacturing is obsolete.

The Fourth Revolution and the CEO mindset’s transformation

The latest IBM CEO study gives some interesting insights into how CEO’s role and priorities change over time. In 2012, this study of more than 1,700 CEOs came with 3 strong topics:

For Employees: Empowering Employees through Values
For Customers: Engaging Customers as Individuals
Amplifying Innovation through partnerships

The study highlights that now at last CEOs of large corporations see that investing in internal social networks (for collaboration) and external social networks (for engaging customers) is mandatory.

One conclusion of the study is “As CEOs ratchet up the level of openness within their organizations, they are developing collaborative environments where employees are
encouraged to speak up, exercise personal initiative, connect with fellow
collaborators, and innovate“.

While only 16% of them do it now, in 3 years time it is expected that a majority of them will get on external social networks:

It is interesting to note how the focus of CEO’s changed in the past decade or so

We can see how the focus changed from revenue growth to change, accounting for complexity and leveraging on employees. This looks like the trajectory of the Fourth Revolution revealed! It is clear that CEOs are “abandoning command and control” (link to an excellent paper by Alexandra Levit) to more collaborative ways of working. This Forbes article “If you don’t have a social CEO you are going to be less competitive” is also a great reference on the IBM study.

There is obviously a big limit to this study: it only considers corporations. When will the corporations feel that they might not be the best value-producing form of organization? When will IBM also study what happens in other organizations? Already today the CEOs need to be much more entrepreneurial. This trend will only further develop and grow. I’m already looking forward to the next studies!

How the Anonymous are a Precursor of the Collaborative Age Organization

This interesting article in the Guardian “Disorganized but effective: how technology lowers transaction costs” highlights how lower the transaction costs has allowed the development of such amorphous groups such as Anonymous or the Occupy movement.

Interestingly, the article takes a perspective on the dramatic change of our capabilities in terms of ‘transaction cost’ that is very similar to our Fourth Revolution concept based on our communication capabilities. It is the same of course. The previous Fundamental Revolutions always saw the creation of more organized bureaucracy – the Agricultural Age’s bureaucracy paving the way for the Industrial Age’s Corporation. The Fourth Revolution is the era of chaos and complexity. And for the first time we can organize chaotic groups that deliver effectively.

Not just the Anonymous, Occupy, other activists but also many groups that are not so much on the dark side, like all the Open Source movement: these are all amorphous groups without visible structure; their weak structure is constantly evolving and never fixed, completely akin to turbulent flow. They rely heavily on technology to communicate, using automation and a choice of synchronous and asynchronous tools.

These groups are in advance on their time; soon we’ll all participate to such groups because chaos begets creation, the value engine of the Fourth Revolution. They are the real precursors of the Collaborative Age turbulent organization.

Welcome to a chaotic, and effective world – Welcome to the Future of the Organization!

Video of the quarter: Don Tapscott on the Collaborative, Open world

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!

How the Fourth Revolution is the era of the individual widget – even for drugs!

The Industrial Age was all about mass production and production for the bulk of the population. That was in particular the dominant economic model of big pharma. Rare diseases were not tackled for the lack of economic viability.

Today this changes completely. Some biotech companies are extremely successful at making drugs for rare, orphan diseases. And social security or private insurance is happy to pay for the hefty price tag – because those diseases are so rare. In this great paper in Forbes, “How A $440,000 Drug Is Turning Alexion Into Biotech’s New Innovation Powerhouse”, we get a great insight into a new business model. A business model which addresses the needs of individuals at the fringe of the mass production model, while remaining profitable.

As in many fields, the Collaborative Age is the Age of production for the individual of customized products. Pharma is just one example. The revolution in manufacturing will bring the same result – produce widgets one by one, on demand.

In the medical field, medicine is becoming more and more individualized. Genetic factors are increasingly taken into account before administering medicines or X-rays, as sensitivities vary. Soon we won’t get mass produced drugs but drugs specifically generated in dosage and type for our own case.

The Fourth Revolution is the era of narrow niches – so narrow that it addresses an individual. Are you still stuck in the mindset of mass production? Change now to understand the world as it transforms!

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