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In her post ‘You say Tomato, I say Tomato… When Language is the Enemy’, Valeria Maltoni remarks that a lot of business strategy vocabulary revolves around war-related terms. The businessman is a tough warrior. She also remarks that war-terminology typically denotes scarcity: “The war metaphor creates the wrong incentives. A mindset of scarcity is a self-fulfilling prophecy, a train wreck waiting to happen. Competition is also keeping people stuck in their ways ? this produces different flavors of thinking about problems and separate languages”

In the new world of abundance of the Collaborative Age, this vocabulary is probably not completely adapted (although there will still be battles for some market positions though). It should be possible to replace it with a more collaborative vocabulary, in particular when it comes to strategies for change and transformation, which require more of an introspective and gentle approach.

Developing such a vocabulary is a trademark of some successful coaches and change consultants, and the cornerstone of a successful organisational transformation.

Should we predict or invent the future? Seth Godin in his blog clearly asks the question and explains his preference:

“The most common way to deal with the future is to try to predict it. To be in the right place at the right time with the right skills or investments.

A far more successful and reliable approach is to invent the future. Not all of it, just a little part. But enough to make a difference.”

While I fully agree with this view, the question comes: what part of the future should we try to invent?

It is obvious that out lives are influenced by many events and factors we can’t really influence directly. Sometimes we try to invent a future but can’t really manage to achieve this ambition.

Pending further analysis, my suggestion would be to try to invent that part of the future that resonates within our wider network. What we can invent within that segment might have a wider influence or remain local. Still what is within our power is to change things within our network.

Let’s focus on what we can invent and change that will influence our wider network and set to change the world!

I find that one of the most common threats we face on a daily basis are threats to our identity. I find that the answer is to develop a sense of identity that is multi-faceted and detached from your current area of occupation.

Threats to our identity happen in particular when we want to escape from our comfort zone or try new things that might not be perfectly aligned with what we have done before – or what people think our identity is.

Still, overcoming these questions about identity is essential in developing ourselves. because self development means our identity tomorrow will be significantly different from our identity today. And we definitely need to overcome the question “who are you to do this?”.

To avoid suffering in this situation, one of the key response is then to make sure our identity is not related directly to what we are busy doing, or at least that some of it is consciously foreign. It is not easy because most organizations will tend on the contrary to try to align our identity to their existence. For example at work it is essential to detach our identity from our actual occupation or job title.

In general, it is essential to consciously develop our identity as a multi-faceted, multi-fold definition to avoid being taken hostage in a single identity.

How multi-faceted is your identity now?

Collaboration is the keyword of the Collaborative Age. As a concept we often oppose Collaborative with Competition, with is more about us against the others. Does it need to be that way?

In a collaborative team, we do compete to give out our best. We compete against ourselves to contribute to the Cause.

Competition does not need to be egoistic in the sense of trying to gain at the expense of others. That’s an Industrial Age view of a world of limited supply that had to be split. The Collaborative Age is a world of plenty where we can create more.

We can thus compete with ourselves to create great performance, and leverage this performance in collaboration.

We know that competition is an approach that allows us to overcome our limits and create true achievements. Together with Collaboration, this creates results into the Collaborative Age.

Inspiration by a great post by Gapingvoid

Happy New Year 2017 to all!

As usual on year end, let me share with you the 10 the most popular posts this year:

• One of My New Adventures: CleanuC
• What Makes Us Really Happy and Healthy in the Long Term
• How We Constantly Underestimate the Role of Luck in Our Lives
• Authenticity: How to Create Meaningful Connections over Social Networks
• Why Discoveries Are Made by Questioning Answers
• What the Facebook News Controversy Teaches Us About Impartiality
• How America Becomes Sedentary When the World Becomes Nomadic
• Why You Should Never Try to Anticipate the Reaction of Other People
• Why a Crisis Could Be Better than a Slow Downfall
• How People Buy More Experiences and Less Things

The fantastic picture of candidate Hillary Clinton waving at her fans that all have their back to her because they are taking selfies is gone around the world. It is not about being there, being to meet and possibly even talk to the candidate that is important. What is important is to have a proof that “I was there” and post it on social networks!

I have already written on How Narcissism Increases in Our Society, but that beats largely all expectations. Not one person seems to be facing the candidate! Actually facing the candidate will probably soon look suspicious.

This picture really questions the kind of society we are moving in. Do we want to live the experience, or be seen to live the experience? Increasingly I find it important to define moments of no-record where I can concentrate on the experience rather than concentrate on how best to broadcast it.

The Era of the Selfie is here. Seeing how it spreads, this surely corresponds to a deep psychological need. Another capability we need to learnt to tame in the Collaborative Age.

We should avoid moralistic judgments. And when one is uttered it also says a lot about the person who says it: “All moralistic judgments, whether positive or negative, are tragic expressions of unmet needs” writes Marshall Rosenberg.

This is why whenever we surprise ourself to speak out a moralistic judgment, it is a clear indicator that we should seek which of our needs is not met.

And conversely when someone else expresses it, we need to overcome a possible rejection and figure out which of their needs requires fulfilling.

Moralistic statements are indicators of needs unmet. Let’s focus on the needs and not so much on the contents of the statement.

“Whether it’s in the arts, at work, or in our relationships, we often resist asking not only because we’re afraid of rejection but also because we don’t even think we deserve what we’re asking for” writes Amanda Palmer in her book ‘The Art of Asking‘.

I find this statement very powerful and to the point. This relates to my personal experience as well, how many times I have not asked for something because I thought I did not deserve it.

We underestimate the power of asking others. Asking for help does wonders sometimes. It shows that you are ready to take on board the opinion and the help of others.

We’re often stopped in our tracks when it comes to asking because we fear of appearing inadequate. Yet when we overcome this fear we often find that it was worth asking. And that we sometimes get new possibilities open that we did not even envisage before.

Come on, ask for help and support more often. And if you feel some apprehension, it is another reason to just go for it!

Image from Amanda Palmer’s tumbler account

Transgression refers to a breach, and is commonly applied to breach of law. A lot of the current business model transformations happen against regulation, or use some existing loopholes (refer to our post “How Regulation is Used to Defend old Institutions“). Going further, we should ask ourselves if true transformations do not generally require some form of transgression.

Regulations and laws tend to defend the status-quo and therefore, need to evolve to be adapted to the new reality of society. In general, these changes lag the actual changes that happen in the world, placing the innovators in the uncomfortable situation of transgression of the established order.

This is a very serious issue that can stop many in their tracks, as law-enforcement can tend to be quite intimidating. At the same time, a lot of real, noticeable changes have required transgression as catalyst. Good examples include racial discrimination fights in the US and elsewhere, and even more recently, the fights of Uber and Airbnb against the establishment and existing institutions. The story of Edward Snowden and his comrades is a clear transgression that brought forth in a useful manner the issue of data surveillance by democratic states.

At the same time all transgressions are not precursors of change; many – probably most of them- are crime-related or individual expressions with no interest to change society. A transgression cannot be seen systematically as a precursor of a beneficial change.

Yet transgression needs to happen for any major change – either full or border line – and we will see more of it as the Fourth Revolution develops. We need to find a way to identify and treat generously those transgressions that are signs of change, compared to all the others that are real attacks against society. That distinction will not be easy, be prepared for a lot of debate!

We often use ‘Fulfillment‘ interchangeably with ‘Happiness‘. Fulfillment is about the achievement of something desired, promised, or predicted; while happiness is well… simply feeling happy.

Some people live a life of fulfillment, for example caring about others in charities or NGOs or achieving their childhood dream. Yet that is not always correlated with happiness. Indeed some senior charity executives are not necessarily happy personally!

Overcoming this confusion is essential because seeking fulfillment is a way taken by many that seek happiness. In reality happiness can happen without pre-condition, it is an attitude that is deeply rooted in the present moment.

If you seek happiness, do not engage all you energy in seeking fulfillment. It may help, but is not sufficient.

Hat tip to Rajiv Vij for the insight during an ICF meeting in Singapore.

“They tried to bury us, but they didn’t know that we were seeds” is a famous Mexican proverb. I found it inspiring when I read it and I find it is a good summary of how we should react to adversity.

There are instances where we can’t do so much about what happens to us, and we get buried. It will be tough and painful at the time.

But what is really important is to learn and grow again differently and taking into account the experience. What is important is also to learn from the experience of what happens to others next to you if they get buried too.

Strong adversity will make us eventually stronger. We will grow into a bigger and stronger self.

When faced with huge difficulties and if you feel you might succumb, let go and focus on growing back different. Be a seed of something new and unique.

“The longer someone ignores an email before finally responding, the more relative social power that person has. Map these response times across an entire organization and you get a remarkably accurate chart of the actual social standing” from a study quoted in the book Focus by Daniel Goleman.

It continues: “The boss leaves emails unanswered for hours or days; those lower down respond within minutes. There’s an algorithm for this, a data mining method called “automated social hierarchy detection” developed at Columbia University. When applied to the archive of email traffic at Enron Corporation before it folded, the method correctly identified the roles of top-level managers and their subordinates just by how long it took them to answer a given person’s emails. Intelligence agencies have been applying the same metric to suspected terrorist gangs, piecing together the chain of influence to spot the central figures.”

So, unless you are trying to hide your hierarchical role in a gang, but want rather to establish some social status, do not respond to emails immediately. Let a few hours pass before responding… this also has the added benefit to make you less addicted to your phone or email and have less remorse if you take more time to respond!