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

What should you do with Criticism?

It’s good to have critics. It shows you are contributing to a worthwhile shift. It means people pay attention to you. It can contribute to improve your product, your art. Here are 6 reasons why criticism is a good thing.

It’s also bad to have critics when it influences you not to give out your best. There are times where you shouldn’t listen to them. There are times you should only listen to you, what brings you alive and what you know the world needs.

So, when should you shun critics and when should you listen to them?

Let me take an example which is close to my heart.

As I am considering a new book it is clear that the topic of the book is non negotiable. It is a message that is growing within me for some time now and that I need to deliver to the world.

The format of the book, whether it will be a story or a non-fiction style, that’s more open to discussion and suggestions. I will still have a strong opinion and I will own the final format.

Finally, the detailed word-for-word editing is something that I consider to be quite open to criticism and improvement (in particular, as English is not my first language).

So it should be for your creations: the main message should not be negotiable; you should own most of the outline of the delivery; and leave critics deal with the detailed editing.

Alas, many people let critics influence their main message and make their detailed editing not negotiable. Don’t fight the wrong battle. It is your main message, coming from your heart, that is the most valuable.

Why, even in a Complex World, you Need to Head Towards your Purpose!

In an ever more complex world where many events become difficult to predict, our tendency would be to follow the flow, let the events drive us.

That’s not how we’ll reach greatness. An acute observer of companies taking decisions in complex environments, Jim Collins, the famous author of Good to Great and his latest book Great by Choice, states:

“Most people start with the outside world and try to figure out, how can we adapt to it? Greatness doesn’t happen that way. It starts with an internal drive. And there is really a key question with big decisions: What are your core values and your real aspirations?”

sailing in storm — While the storm might bring you astray from the route, you sure still know where you want to go!

It is vital to have a direction when it comes to taking decisions, even in a complex world. Personal Purpose is essential, aligned with your core values and true aspirations. And actually, Jim Collin’s research shows that the most successful companies are those that maintain their heading the most consistently. Like the captain of a ship in the midst of a storm, he can accommodate temporary changes of direction to minimize the effect of wind and waves, but still knows where his goal lies.

Be agile in responding to events. But keep your eye fixed on where you want to go, and come back to your initial heading! Only then, of course, will you be able to reach it!

Quotes are from the foreword to the book The Greatest Business Decisions of All Times by Fortune Magazine editors

Why We Need to Stop the Race for Complication

“Simplicity has been difficult to implement in modern life because it is against the spirit of a certain brand of people who seek sophistication so that they can justify their profession” – Nicholas Taleb in his highly recommended new book, Antifragile.

During my time as a civil servant I could not stop wondering (and admiring) how bureaucrats were constantly complicating rules and processes “to better take into account individual situations and avoid threshold effects”. Bureaucrats cannot imagine anything different than complicated systems and procedures. But what they did not realize is that real life is complex. And complication is not the same as complex! Their quest to manage the complex using even more complicated rules is doomed to fail. Yet they continue. Legal systems become increasingly bloated as they try to deal with all sorts of situation. This quest will be lost – nature will always be far more imaginative than the most imaginative bureaucrat.

Let’s stop this stupid quest for complication. The solution lies in simplicity. Because complex systems – real life – will react and adapt to simple messages and solutions. Because the cost of complication is far greater than its advantage. Let’s seek simplicity in all we do – and suddenly we’ll tame complexity.

Complicated is not the same as Complex – and Why this is Important

Complicated is a very different concept from Complex. Yet most of us do not distinguish them. Even more, we try to manage Complex systems with Complicated solutions. And this turns out to be a very huge problem.

A watch: a complicated system - predictable and reliable — A watch: a complicated system – predictable and reliable

A watch is complicated. It is composed of a large number of pieces; yet they are carefully engineered to fit and move together. The system is very reliable (it’s a watch!). Most engineered systems are complicated, yet reliable. The more the components fit seamlessly together, the better the reliability.

A complex system: a representation of the situation in Afghanistan

On the contrary, a complex system involves a lot of different components or contributors; they are all interconnected and inter-dependent; but they all follow a different interest, and they make the system unpredictable. The now classical slide describing the situation in Afghanistan to General McCrystal is a classical example of the depiction of a complex system.

Complex systems are unpredictable. They are what happens in real life outside what can be carefully engineered. They are what creates the unforeseen, the adventure.

Because we mix all the time those two concepts we misunderstand a lot of what is happening around us. The way to tackle and repair complicated systems is completely different from how we can influence complex systems. The way these systems fail belongs to different realms. And when a complicated system encounters unpredictable complexity, it is where our engineering capabilities are overwhelmed. It is where our certainties become shaky. It is when catastrophes like Fukushima happen.

How Many Seeds Did You Plant Today?

“Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant” – Robert Louis Stevenson.

Our life is uncertain and unpredictable. We can’t know what will come out of our latest initiative, and possibly, it will look quite different from what we envisaged.

What we can do, though, is make sure we plant everyday enough seeds so that when they grow, we’ll have a few successes among the outright failures and those other seeds that won’t grow any useful products. Most of what you start will fail. It’s just a matter of starting enough stuff to succeed.

Ask yourself how many seeds you planted today: how many new people you met, how many initiatives you started or tested. That’s what should be your golden standard.

How will you double the number of seeds you plant daily, weekly?

Why You Should Fail More Often

Let’s come back to the financial markets as a model of complex system that can be easily measured. What are the strategies that can provide gains with limited risks and significant chance of success?

Investment is more about managing the emotions of failure than it is about being clever

Professionals will tell you that the winning strategies (provided there are winning strategies,as we now can doubt from our post on the superiority of randomness) always involve some dose of failure. The trick is to have less failures than wins, and / or smaller failures than wins. As long as you invest more on stocks that have chances of recovering, over time this strategy will provide interesting returns with a relative certainty – the larger returns being generated by the larger or more frequent number of tries.

What is interesting here is that real professionals that deal with the stock market everyday will never speak of ‘sure win’. They know they have to accept a certain amount of failure. They know there will be bad days as there will be good days – only hopefully slightly less frequently. They know they will have to deal with the emotions of failure and not let themselves be driven by them.

In our real life, that complex system, the lesson holds. We can’t succeed without a certain dose of failure. And the more often we try, the higher will be our overall success. We just need to make sure that any failure will not kill us (that we have a cut-loss soon enough) and that our successes have a bigger upside than our failures’ downside.

In complex systems, frequent failure is the key to success. So, when do you start to fail more often?

Analytic Decision-Making Is Worse than Random More Often Than You Think!

Scientific thought and literature sometimes contains disturbing concepts. A number of papers have shown, for example, that on financial markets, random stock picking is better than informed choices made by any “professional” investor.

Decision making: should you not throw dices instead of over-analyzing?

Here’s another fun example of such study: how Orlando the cat beat professionals in a contest. The article goes on to explain that it is not an isolated study. And that in fact, those investors which we admire because of the high return on their investment they generate, might just have been lucky (over the short period where we observe them). As the article mentions, Daniel Kahneman, Nobel prize in economics, showed over a sample that “the correlation between those fund managers who were successful in one year and those who were successful in the next year was close to zero (0.01) over eight years“.

Financial markets are the archetype of the complex system. In such a system it seems that random decision-making is better then (excessive) analysis.

When I presented this idea to a room full of engineers a few weeks ago they probably took me for a fool. Yet as the complexity of our world increases, it is not certain that the best way to take the right decisions is to enhance further our analytic models, which will be less and less representative of reality.

Have some dices in your pockets. In complex situations, throwing them might be the best decision-making method!

How Some People Become Addicted to Defy Resistance

In this blog we have often mentioned ‘Resistance’ or how our primitive brain tries to impede us to create or do anything remotely outside our comfort zone (the concept originates in the excellent “War of Art” book). It routinely tricks us into a number of behaviors designed to impede us from trying new things, like for example procrastination. We also know that Resistance is the Symptom That You Are on the Right Track.

Beyond simple Resistance that impedes us from giving our best self, some people, those that are often labelled compulsive artists, probably become so used to defy Resistance that some become addicted. And because they are addicted to meeting and overcoming Resistance, they can’t stop defying it, day-in and day-out.

This symptom can be observed in other areas that require to overcome a significant natural fear for performing the core of the activity: for example, sky-divers and all sorts of extreme sportspeople; actors; public speakers… Some of them (and probably all of those who become professional at it) definitely become so hooked to that sensation of Resistance, of stage fright, that they can’t live without it for long. They need their periodic dose of Resistance. They need to feel that thrill running in their nerves.

Once you become accustomed at identifying Resistance and adept at overcoming it; once you become familiar with Resistance to the point of being able to tame it sometimes, watch yourself. It is possible that you might even become addicted to it without being able to stop stretching yourself.

In all cases, make sure you have the right safety net around you so that you keep it safe, and enjoy every minute of playing with your ‘Resistance’ – and change yourself and the world!

Resistance is the Symptom That You Are on the Right Track

The point is made by Seth Godin in his new book, the Icarus Deception:

“The resistance is the symptom that you are on the right track“.

When your inner emergency exit sign lights up, it's possibly the message that you should stay! — When your inner emergency exit sign lights up, it’s possibly the message that you should stay!

This is so true. When I try something outside my comfort zone, or which entails a part of uncertainty and risk (in particular when it involves others), resistance has a way of wrenching my stomach, and create all sort of procrastinating activities to avoid getting me to focus on what’s really important. Now, with some experience, I know that when that happens I am probably onto something that will make a difference.

In other words, when my inner emergency sign lights up, in most cases, it means that I should stay because I have touched something important!

Thus, “ The resistance is not something to be avoided: it is something to be sought out. The artist seeks out the feeling of resistance and then tries to maximize it.”

You too should seek out the feeling of resistance. Remember, Life begins at the end of your comfort zone. Resistance will let you know when you’ll exit your usual comfort zone. Take advantage of it!

Three Questions to Help You Define your True Aspirations

Jim Collins gives us three questions to define our aspirations (actually, he gave it in the context of a company but it does work for us personally too!):

What are your real core values and your real aspirations?
What is the truth about the outside world?
When you intersect your drive with your reality, what’s the truth about what you can distinctively contribute potentially better than anyone in the world?

Question 2 is absolutely essential to reality-check that our aspirations and core value can find resonance with the outside world (and respond to our basic needs too!). It’s certainly tough to have a clear view of the world beyond our usual bubble (and might require some help from other people with other point of view), but it’s absolutely critical.

These questions are very powerful. What’s your answers? What’s the reality check of your current aspirations like?

Quotes are from the foreword to the book The Greatest Business Decisions of All Times by Fortune Magazine editors

Thrive Through Complexity by Leveraging Collaboration of an Effective Team

Not only is Collaboration the key to deal with Uncertainty; the extreme collaborative setup, the Effective, Performing Team, is the key to tackle Complexity. That’s in effect the meaning of the conclusion of Jim Collins we quoted in the blog post “How to Take Decisions in a Complex Environment“.

team table — Are you presently mobilizing an effective, performing team?

It is tough to reach the point of achieving a high performing, effective team. In effect, this is the ultimate model of collaboration, where connection between individuals reaches such an emotional depth that it allows to mobilize all of the participant’s resources for the sake of the team’s purpose.

Depending on the level of performance of the team, different levels of complexity can be tackled; but the most uncertain, most complex situations can only be dealt with a totally committed, effective team.

In my consulting work I often observe how getting the leadership team of organizations to work as a performing team is the first condition for any effective transformation. It should be the first focus, instead of launching initiatives all over the place (as most organizations stuck in a rut tend to do).

Do you have an effective, performing team to help you through complexity? If not, what are you going to do to get it working as it should? That should be your first priority, now!

Why you Should Live with a Large Amount of Uncertainty in your Life

According to Tony Robbins, “The quality of your life is in direct proportion to the amount of uncertainty you can comfortably live with“.

dice illusion — How comfortable are you with uncertainty and illusions?

This quote can be taken in two ways. A first, protective way is to suppose that the more you can bear uncertainty, the least disturbed you will be by what is happening around you and the happier you will be. This is quite a limited view which will not lead to transforming your life.

I certainly prefer to think of uncertainty rather as a source of opportunity – a second way to understand this quote. Uncertainty is the key for unexpected success in today’s increasingly complex world. The unexpected encounters, unforeseeable events or the unexpected viral effect of an artistic production actually shape much of today’s world. Just before these uncertain things happen, uncertainty was at its maximum. Just after, our world and existence took a turn. The world branched out. If you can’t bear the high level of uncertainty linked with releasing something to the world, then you can’t shape it. You can’t shape your life.

Living with uncertainty is at the same time uncomfortable and exciting. It is not a character trait, it is a choice. So, are you ready to choose to live with a high level of uncertainty in your life? Are you ready to grab those opportunities that will come close to you?

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