Category: Institutions and Revolutions

The end of the materialistic American Dream.

This is the end of the American Dream.

classical american dream picture
classical american dream picture

At least part of it. The part that was materialistic. The part where middle class workers, if working hard and persistently, could pretend to all the materialistic belongings that the consumption society would offer: a house, a car, a fridge, a TV…

That’s because, being a middle class employee of a large manufacturing company is a concept that is disappearing with the end of the Industrial Age.

That’s because we are not any more in an Age of materialistic scarcity. We are now an era of abundance. Material belongings define much less our identity.

Still so many people are fond of the image of the “American dream”, possibly because it is a secure life of lifelong employment, where plans could be made over decades in a stable environment, where progressive savings would buy the belongings of your dreams.

Stop dreaming. That’s over.
Don’t live in delusion. The world has changed.

It is not getting more unsafe. It is getting different. The Fourth Revolution is there. It will change our image of success.
Tomorrow, the World Dream will be ours.

Share

POD (print-on-demand) and 3-D printing

Did you hear about 3-D printing? Today there are printing machines that are able to print in three dimensions, complex shapes.

3D printing in action
3D printing in action

They use much less material than conventional manufacturing (which starts from a large chunk of material and removes most of it through machining).

They build objects layers after layers, using perfectly controlled materials.

An article by The Economist on 3D printing highlights the current development status and the potentialities of the technology. By the way, the glove above was 3D printed.

So, let’s now cross the potentialities of 3D printing of objects with POD (print-on-demand). When will be the day where you find a nice new object in a magazine, will download the file and get it printed at the next door 3D printing shop?

No more worries of having to search store after store for that unique object of your dreams. Design it and print it!

Well that might come a few years later than for books POD, but that’ll come. And then manufacturing, in the Industrial Age meaning of mass production, will shrink significantly. Because we want to have unique objects, 3D objects POD will be the response. Only those basic components which benefit greatly from the savings of mass production will remained produced that way.

Are you ready for the revolution of 3-D objects print-on-demand?

Share

The future of manufacturing and POD (print-on-demand)

Do you know POD (print-on-demand)? Well that’s quite easy: you choose the book you want and a machine produces it for you in a few minutes, cover, binding and all.

print-on-demand machine
print-on-demand machine

That’s not a dream: that’s today. As a self-publisher, Amazon and a number of others propose to put my book on display in their electronic stores. Should anyone buy it, a copy gets printed and sent.

No more stocks of hundreds of books that might not be sold. No more risk to produce stocks of no value. Just-in-time print-on-demand.

What’s visionary though is electronic bookstores just consisting of a print-on-demand (POD) machine. Because people still like to touch books and get a quick glimpse inside. But soon that will take off.

Think of it. Today more than 60% of the price of a book is distribution – manual handling, logistics, taking back unsold books etc. POD just does bypass this problem. It will remove distributors as intermediaries and create value by making more books physically available everywhere that a huge bookstore could ever contain.

POD will replace bulk manufacturing. Because it will also apply to everything else, not just books.

Share

Measuring the available cognitive surplus

A useful statistics in the excellent book by Clay Shirky, “cognitive surplus“.

Cognitive surplus is that cognitive capability that is available during our free time. It has steadily increased during the Industrial Revolution, in particular in the 20th century. But, it has mainly been devoted to broadcasting media, and mainly TV.

American watch about 200 billion hours of TV every year (and, interestingly enough, this is still increasing).

All of Wikipedia, all articles, edits, in all languages represents roughly about 100 million hours of contributions (over 10 years or so).

Hence, Wikipedia, this extraordinary sum of human knowledge, permamently updated (so much that it is a worthwhile source of information) represents less than 0.005% of the available cognitive surplus.

So… can you imagine what will happen when just 1% of the available cognitive surplus will be used for the community?

That’s right, it will be a true Revolution, the Fourth Revolution.

When do you start contributing a small share of your cognitive surplus?

Share

The education system revolution: developing curiosity

Our current education system was created during the Industrial Age. It was made mandatory in the second half of the 19th century in most developed countries to produce the manpower Industry was requiring.

What skills were taught? Basic literacy and conformance.

Einstein on curiosity and education
Einstein on curiosity and education

No wonder that Einstein reflected “It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education”.

Curiosity is now what we need. What we need to develop – with some other skills like Presence and Choice. Because we need to educate for creativity.

When will we say “It is a miracle that conformance survived education”?

Sooner than we can expect, because the young generation today thrives by being curious. But that will require great changes in our education system. And then for sure the Collaborative Age will be flourishing!

Note – the image of this blog comes from the “Presentation zen” blog, a blog by Garr Reynold, a presentation specialist living in Japan, with some very interesting insights about what it takes to do great presentations.

Share

Collaborative tools and catastrophes: transformation of the emergency response

Collaborative tools of the Fourth Revolution are reshaping the way we manage catastrophic events.

Examples from the Japan Earthquake:

If you are looking for information on people in the quake zone, Google has opened a Person Finder page.

Ushahidi, a crowdsourcing mapping tool, has set up a local platform for Japanthat allows people in the area affected by the earthquake to text the location of people who may be trapped in damaged buildings

And did you notice how Facebook is slow these days? That’s certainly because so many people use it to connect, give news to loved ones.

The full extend of how these collaborative tools will change emergency response is, I believe, not yet apprehended by Emergency Response Institutions. For example, this great video from TED shows how collaborative map making changed the response to the Haiti quake.

Emergency Response Institutions need to account for the Fourth Revolution. People are connected. They stay connected. And together they can greatly help themselves. When Emergency Response Institutions will know how to leverage this connectivity, their intervention methods will transform for the better.

Emergency Response institutions need to change. Let’s tell them.

Share

Deep learning from the “law of requisite variety”: practice your flexibility!

The “law of requisite variety” is a fundamental insight in our world. It is not well known. It should be recognized as a fundamental new insight that changes our understanding or the world.

The law itself comes from cybernetics – the study of systems controlled with feedback loops. Articulated in 1948 by Ashby, it states in its original form “only variety can destroy variety”. To be effective, the control system needs to have more variety than the perturbations of system it controls.

It has been taken up under a slightly different form in the 1970’s by the initiators of NLP – neuro-linguistic programming. In their words, “the actor with the greatest flexibility of behavior will ultimately control the system“.
In other words, the most flexible and adaptable actor will dominate.

We now know that most systems in our world – climate, biology, society – are systems controlled by feedback loops. This law should then apply to most of our world.

Darwin’s theory is but the application of this law to biology. Darwin’s theory is that the species most adapted to its environment will thrive. That does not just mean a static adaptation like the color of the bird or the shape of its beak. It also means, the level of dynamic adaptability, of flexibility.
That humans have come to dominate most of their environment and the rest of the ecosystem is not because they are the strongest or physiologically the most adapted – it is because they are the most flexible and adaptable thanks to their intelligence.

Let’s now take this insight into the field of economics and society. The most adaptable and flexible will eventually dominate.
For organizations it means that flexibility and adaptability is a primordial condition for success. For institutions and governments also. The natural tendency to create organizations and institutions that try to freeze a situation to their benefit is doomed in the long term.
The quest for success should be to seek to enhance the flexibility and the adaptability of organizations and institutions rather than devise all sorts impediments to change.

It is also applicable on a personal level. To thrive, you need to be more flexible and adaptable than the world around you.

So, when do you start practicing that fundamental skill – flexibility?

Share

The Institutions’ Revolutions – part 6 of the Manifesto is online!

Four Institutions will be deeply transformed – manufacturing, government and representative democracy, education and intellectual property. Find out how they will be transformed in part 6 of the Fourth Revolution Manifesto – now online.

Fourth Revolution Manifesto part VI cover

You can access the part VI of the Fourth Revolution Manifesto – FOUR institutions that will be deeply transformed by clicking on the link. You can also read and share the document on Scribd – it has a great reader and can also be used as a backup if the above link does not work: the Fourth Revolution Manifesto – part VI on Scribd .

Don’t hesitate to comment and bring in suggestions in the comments to this blog post!

Can’t wait to see the follow-up? Next week, in part 7 of the Fourth Revolution Manifesto we’ll finally uncover FOUR KEYS TO SUCCESS IN THE COLLABORATIVE AGE!

Share

The Fourth Revolution Blog on the institution revolution – a retrospective

As part VI of the manifesto is due to be published this week-end on the “institutions revolution” this blog offers a retrospective on a few blogs published by The Fourth Revolution Manifesto on the transformation of institutions

Perfectly acceptable institutions will become inappropriate beyond the Fourth Revolution

Once established, institutions flight for their survival

Professions are just a type of institutions

A great example of what developing countries can bring to the world

Enjoy!

Share

The empathic civilization by Jeremy Rifkin – neuroscience discoveries and the Fourth Revolution

This great animated video by “RSA animate” discusses the empathic civilization, based on a presentation by Jeremy Rifkin.

It shows how very recent neuroscience findings (1990 onwards), using the new technologies of non-invasive brain imagery (a result of the new theories of physics like quantum mechanics that are the precursor of the Fourth Revolution), give incredible insights on the operation of body and mind. That when communication exists between human beings, we automatically empathize.

Thanks to the new long distance interactive communication technology, we can empathize with the whole of humankind, with the whole world. The fundamental consciousness shift that is occurring today as a result will change the world, because our family is extended to the entire humankind and beyond.

We empathize with people at the other end of the globe that are suffering hardship. We give to causes that are entirely alien to our daily life, to fight poverty or hunger at the other end of the globe.

Are you ready to look at humankind as just one single family?

Share

The 21st century enlightenment – the Fourth Revolution in action

Have a look at this very good video on the 21st century enlightenment by RSA. The approach is very much aligned with the Fourth Revolution concept and approach.

It is also a very interesting view point on the need for an empathic civilization and what are the institutions that are needed beyond the Fourth Revolution.

The video shows very clearly the limits of many values and assumptions of the Industrial Age. Beyond materialistic possessions, what makes us really happy? Are our Industrial Age quests for progress, justice and freedom really what we need?

The video finishes on this quote from Margaret Mead: “A small group of thoughtful people could change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”
Margaret Mead lived before internet and cheap long distance interactive communication. Today, a small group of people can assemble beyond the oceans and the continents in the virtual world. More than ever before, thoughtful people can get together. And change the world.

When do you start a group of thoughtful people?

Share

A great example of what developing countries can bring to the world

A great example of what developing countries can bring to the world is explained in the TED talk by Shahi Tharoor on India’s soft power. This great talk is a great example of how developing countries – India in this instance – could bring a different view and approach to the world.

It is also a great example to meditate on the power of the new cheap long distance interaction in the daily life of people, even in the poorest countries.

The interesting paradox is that Shashi Tharoor was finally dismissed from his political position because he was a bit too transparent in his usage of Twitter. Some institutions still have it hard to face modern realities – and Indian bureaucracy is certainly a great example of institutions that will fight modern technology to death.

Nevertheless the Fourth Revolution will prevail. This is the direction of history. Whether the road will be smooth or bumpy is another story. We all can decide on that.

Take the 20 minutes or so to listen to that enlightening talk. It is worth it. It might change your view of the world.

Share