K.E.E.N. skills | The Fourth Revolution Blog

How the Collaborative Age Requires Generalists to Bridge Between Disciplines

While the Industrial Age required more and more specialists, the Collaborative Age increasingly requires generalists that are able to foster collaboration across disciplines. And this becomes increasingly recognized.

Complex problems require multidisciplinary approaches. This is very obvious in a number of areas today, and in particular in the field of Big Data analysis. Generalists that can bridge across disciplines are in high demand. They need to be able to understand the basics of each discipline and bring to the table analytical, facilitation and coordination skills to generate the expected outcomes. They also need to be able to translate between disciplines and calm down the spirits of experts who always find difficult to work with other experts.

I still remember some career advice I received not so long ago about the danger to be a generalist, and that I should rather specialize. I do not think it is such a good advice today. Of course it is always good to be a specialist in some field at the start of your career so as to understand what it takes, but as you advance I do think it is today quite an interesting alternative to become a generalist.

This generalist profile will become ever more valuable as the Collaborative Age spreads and the problems that need to be resolved become more complex. It also highlights the benefits of an education that includes a substantial amount of liberal arts and general knowledge.

Why You Need to Listen to What a Person Says of Others

I like this quote of Audrey Hepburn – “You can tell more about a person by what he says about others than what others say about him“.

I think this is very true, and reinforces the fact that we all need to act in the way we’d like others to act with regard to us, in particular when it comes to gossiping or managing confidential information!

It also reminds us to listen to really discover the person we have in front of us. Active listening is a great skill that can be developed with practice and focus. We need to constantly look beyond the superficial meaning of words to apprehend the person, how she sees the world and how she sees others.

Listening to what people say of a person is important but does not replace a direct contact with a person in a situation of full listening (which requires a face-to-face encounter). Foster the person to talk about others and you will certainly have a good idea of her character!

Why You Should Not Let Success Isolate Yourself

Success isolates. It may not look like it, because success breeds courtship by a number of followers praising you all the time, but the truth is that success does isolate from true friends and trusted feedback. At least if we let it happen.

For the creative, and for entrepreneurs, which are subset of the creative, this is a major issue, because exchanging ideas and having real, tough conversations with others is at the source of creativity. Thus if the successful creative lets isolation take place as per the natural evolution of things, creativity will dry up!… And so will success, one day or the other

Actually the rule should be that more success should leave more time to create trustful, deep relationships. It will require a lot of effort because success tends rather to breed superficial relationships with many people that want to take a lot of time. Yet again and again, I have observed how ‘successful’ people became more and more isolated from their true friends that could tell them the truth, how tough and difficult to hear it could be.

It can be tough to get constructive contradiction from friends, but that’s the only way to grow. If you encounter success, beware of the isolation trap and how it will limit your potential!

What The Two Levels of Confidence Are

Following our previous post on ‘Why Showing Confidence is So Important‘, a key question for me is whether Confidence needs to be associated with a skill level of some sort, or can just be a general Confidence level.

I thus think there are two levels of confidence, and the second is much harder to achieve that the first:

First level: confidence achieved through a high mastery of a particular skill. The confidence level stems from a demonstrable capability that is quite higher than most can achieve
Second level: general confidence level, irrespective of a skill level. It can stem from a general confidence about life and that things will always turn for the better, or other sources such a religion. In any case, it comes from a much deeper belief.

I find that not so many people can reach the second level of confidence and it generally takes practice and exercise. Exercise your confidence to be able to use it more often and when you need it!

How to Embrace Failure, but not too Tight!

It has become extremely fashionable to claim that failure is a decisive element of success. This has turned quite extreme, with stories ‘from rags to riches’, almost like if utmost failure (personal and professional) was a pre-requisite of success. It is almost as if each successful person had to find a way to show that at some point in his or her life, he or she was at the point of utter emotional breakdown with less than 10 cents on their bank account!

Jordan failure — Yes, we need to embrace failure. But like Michael Jordan, it should not be life-threatening. Don’t embrace failure too tight!

I think this is too extreme, and like any fashionable statement, it is time to bring some measure in it.

Failure is indeed a way to get immediate feedback and an indisputable way to progress. So, it is reasonable to seek a healthy part of failure as part of the learning and trying process. True – if you don’t encounter failure, it’s probably because you don’t try hard enough. At the same time, utter and total failure needs to be avoided as well. It damages people personally, their families and it can extremely difficult to recover.

Failure and tough times create resilience. Yet resilience can also be obtained otherwise, by the force of character and repeated exercise. Take for example Michael Jordan. Yes, he failed many times. In small ways. But his drive was his own, and that’s how he became successful. And he did fail small, never big. Even when he went to a year playing baseball, a ‘big’ failure, it was not putting everything in jeopardy. He was able to come back successfully to basket-ball. He gained the experience, and kept being successful.

Yes, seek to extend your comfort zone and fail to learn, but make sure that your risk remains reasonable. Don’t embrace failure too tight!

Why Showing Confidence is So Important

“Whoever has confidence always has the upper hand” – Manoj Vasudevan explained in a presentation about presentation skills I attended.

Think it through – at least on the short term, in an encounter, whoever has the most apparent confidence will in effect have the upper hand. I have personally encountered this with the highly powered, confident salesman-type person. We all know those people who are always highly confident whatever the subject.

At the same time I would not say that this effect is necessary sustainable, and reflection will allow to consider what was proposed in a more rational manner.

Still it remains that confidence is an exceptionally powerful ingredient in our daily lives and we need to be able to radiate confidence when needed.

How is your confidence muscle? What are the occasions where you think you should have shown more confidence and what can you do to look more confident next time?

How Your Attention Determines Your Reality

“How we deploy our attention determines what we see” – quoted from Anne Treisman in the book Focus by Daniel Goleman. A more poplar quote is attributed to Star Wars Jedi masters: “Your focus is your reality“.

Controlling our own attention is an extremely important skill, in particular today as multiple technologies increasingly compete to grab our attention almost every minute of our waked life.

As our perception is filtered more or less automatically by our learned categorization. Focusing our attention is the only way that allows us to see beyond our learned filters to discover new things. Thus, attention is the only for us to grow and develop intellectually and spiritually.

Your reality is determined by where you focus your attention. Develop your attention skill. It needs to be trained like a muscle. A simple exercise is how long you can concentrate on a task or a book without looking at your messages or your emails. Remove unwanted notifications from your life, and grow your reality!

Why True Leaders Know How to Handle Their Fear

Over time I found that the main difference between good and bad leaders is how they manage their fear and anxiety.

Leaders that try to change things or create something new are always submitted to huge quantities of stress and of fear – personal fear as well as organizational fear.

Bad leaders transmit fear and stress to their team. It cascades down, creating negative feelings throughout the organization, hampering true work, destroying creativity and innovation. People just wait for the next outburst of stress and try to avoid being in the way. That occupies most of their time.

Good leaders on the contrary, still faced with the same situation, know how to tame their fear and most importantly, act as a filter for their team, making sure people remain in a situation where they can do their best work. At the end, there will be a tremendous difference in the outcome from the organization.

Above all, don’t think that transmitting fear to your team is a good personal solution that would avoid yourself facing it. Because the final outcome will be bad, it will only reinforce your anxiety and that can easily be very destructive.

If you want to become a better leader, you need to learn to manage your fears and anxiety by yourself.

Hat tip to Gapingvoid for the inspiration

Why We Need to Set Boundaries to Practice Compassion

“This research has taught me that if we really want to practice compassion, we have to start by setting boundaries and holding people accountable for their behavior” writes Brene Brown in her book ‘The Gifts of Imperfection’.

She continues, “Setting boundaries and holding people accountable is a lot more work than shaming and blaming. But it’s also much more effective. Shaming and blaming without accountability is toxic“.

What appears initially as very counter-intuitive gets explained in that last sentence. It also illustrates that real compassion is hard work.

What is really compassion? According to Wikipedia it is ‘the act of going out of your way to help physical, spiritual, or emotional hurts or pains of another’. Doing this movement without setting accountability is certainly toxic for ourselves first, and for the other person in need as well on the longer term. We need to set our boundaries and enforce them.

Next time you feel compassionate, ask yourself where your boundary should be, and hold the other accountable.

Why is Deliberate Practice so Powerful?

“This focus on stretching your ability and receiving immediate feedback provides the core of a more universal principle— [deliberate practice] – one that I increasingly came to believe provides the key to successfully acquiring career capital in almost any field” writes Cal Newport’s in his book ‘So Good They Can’t Ignore You’.

We have already mentioned this concept of deliberate practice in the post where we reviewed the book ‘Talent is overrated’. Practice is not sufficient. It needs to be accompanied by pertinent and frequent feedback and challenge.

The psychologist who came with the concept, Ericsson, is quoted as writing “Most individuals who start as active professionals… change their behavior and increase their performance for a limited time until they reach an acceptable level. Beyond this point, however, further improvements appear to be unpredictable and the number of years of work… is a poor predictor of attained performance“.

Practice that is not deliberate will soon lead to a performance plateau. Get frequent feedback and stretch yourself constantly to reach mastery instead.

Now… how can you develop more deliberate practice in the activities you’d like to become great at?

Why There is a Limit in How Much We Can Be in Flow

Flow, as defined by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, involves Optimal Experience, when “a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile“. And, according to him, this experience is extremely pleasurable, the basis for happiness – “Enjoyment appears at the boundary between boredom and anxiety, when the challenges are just balanced with the person’s capacity to act”

We should thus normally seek to be more often in that state. Most people are never or rarely in Flow, so their problem is to be in that state more often.

On the other hand, for those that have found a way to be in Flow often, could we eventually manage to be in that state all the time?

To be in Flow we need to be able to focus our attention on a task that requires a large amount of our internal resources.

In my experience, and also in the experience of other people (for example those involved in creative activities), this state is very pleasurable and also very exhausting, because of the resources it requires. While we should seek to be in Flow often, we can’t sustain it for the entire day. We also need to rest doing more menial tasks, or even lay our mind to rest through meditation or contemplation. Indeed, most writers and creative people are in flow for only a limited number of hours per day, and spend the rest of the time doing daily tasks that do not require much effort.

Nevertheless, the sense of achievement from the moments we have spent in Flow is generally sufficient to make our day.

By all means, seek to be in Flow often, but don’t beat yourself if you can’t sustain that state for more than a limited number of hours per day!

All quotes from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book ‘Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience’.

How Mindfulness Is Becoming Mainstream in Organizations

Mindfulness has been in the air for some years, in particular in California start-ups. It even seems that having a meditating practice is kind of a social obligation in the Silicon Valley these days. It has now become mainstream and has noticeably been part of the Davos summit this year, whereas it would have been quite out of question a few years ago.

A number of interesting papers have been written on the matter, such as ‘At Davos, Rising Stress Spurs Goldie Hawn Meditation Talk’ on Bloomberg, ‘Amid the Chattering of the Global Elite, a Silent Interlude’ in the NY Times. Why them such popularity?

Of course the boilerplate explanations include: an increasingly stressful world, compounded by smartphone addiction which really does not help putting the mind at rest. People seek a way to unplug even for a few minutes, and some recipe to manage their stress. Some others squarely seek in meditation and mindfulness a competitive advantage.

All these explanations are valid, in particular the need to learn to deal with the much increased amount of solicitations we are subjected to. Deeply I believe it also responds to the need for the individual to increasingly own its actions, and respond rather than react, even inside Industrial Age organizations that were initially designed for individuals to act like cogs in a large machine.

Mindfulness will probably spread further in organizations. We must be careful not to fall in the trendy obligation or just a way to improve well-being in daily work. It must translate into a real change of the organization’s culture.

Let’s start. Just take 5 and breathe!

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