The Fourth Revolution Blog

What’s hiding behind crowdfunding sites?

Kickstarter (www.kickstarter.org) is a site that crowd-funds creative ventures.

It is part of the history of crowdfunding.

Have a look at the homepage. You’ll see many projects looking for funding. An example of a successful project is given in this excellent post by Mitch Joel: “kickstart your economy”.

Actually I encourage you to dwell into the projects and see how the site works. Did you get it?

No, the power of Kickstarter does not lie only in the fact that it allows funding for creative new ventures to happen through the accumulation of numerous small donations (the crowdfunding bit).

It also lies in the fact that donors vote with their feet (or rather, their keyboard and plastic card) on what projects they find the best. It is intrinsically a voting engine.

It also lies in the community building power around each project, with the project owner giving away some goodies to the generous donors, giving updates on the project progress after it has been funded…

Thus, what looks like pure crowdfunding is also a vehicle of choice and community building. It is a vehicle of the Collaborative Age. Below what just looks like a fun crowdsourcing service for weird creative projects lies the fuel of the Collaborative Age value production system: communities and crowd-voting.

Welcome to the Collaborative Age.

The corporate revolution is upon us!

The coming corporate revolution due to collaborative technology becomes mainstream. See for example this interesting article by Forbes “Social Power and the Coming Social Revolution”.

Several examples in this paper show how consumers can influence company decisions, sometimes decisively. While most of the examples are negative (social networks impede organizations to do something), no doubt that with experience, those contributions will be leveraged positively by successful organizations.

Some quotes for thought from the paper:

In this new world of business, companies and leaders will have to show authenticity, fairness, transparency and good faith. If they don’t, customers and employees may come to distrust them, to potentially disastrous effect.

When confronting social power, you might as well jump in with both feet, because you just can’t hide. […] For one big company it recently turned up 60,000 different social media pages where employees mentioned or discussed company matters. (Not to mention the thousands of employee profiles on LinkedIn.)

Accepting social power as inevitable can significantly change the kind of products you design.

Says Microsoft and Lotus veteran Ozzie: “All this was unstoppable from the moment somebody installed the first network—this steady march toward reducing friction and reducing transaction costs faced by individuals. And you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”

So, when do you start opening your organization? It becomes every day more urgent! And soon it will be too late!

Are you afraid of the light?

“We can easily forgive a child to be afraid of the dark, but the real tragedy of life is when adults are afraid of the light” – Plato

We encounter this situation everyday. And I do encounter it often when it comes to the Fourth Revolution.

The natural reaction is always one of resistance, of hiding, of avoiding the glaring light.

Only those that come out in the light will learn how the world changes.

Think about your life now. Are you afraid of the light? Come on, put your sunglasses on if you need, but come out in the open, with us. It’s worth it.

10 personal practices to thrive through the Fourth Revolution

I have been asked to summarize the main practices of the successful K.E.E.N.

So, here are 10 basic practices to be successful through the Fourth Revolution, into the Collaborative Age:

Practice regular, holistic exercise (not just the body, but also the emotions/ mind exercises)
Lean into the Collaborative Age. Become literate in social networks: use them – even only at a basic level. You’ll progress soon enough;
Be open to new ideas by following some leading blogs and publications;
At the same time, make sure spare sufficient quality time every day to focus on activities that are important for you;
Practice overcoming Resistance more often by practicing dedicated Creative Work time
Establish your clear purpose – what can you do better than everybody else, and how can you contribute to the world through this talent? (on that one in particular you might need external help)
Write your purpose and 1 year goal on a paper and post it on your bathroom mirror to watch them morning and evenings
Practice and enhance your connection and giving skills
Practice being fully present, controlling your inner chatter, filters and impulses;
Be flexible – master your ego – remember the law of requisite variety: the most flexible prevails at the end.

More of it and more details in the Fourth Revolution book!

The Fourth Revolution in 10 bullet points

I have had some requests for a quick digest of the Fourth Revolution book.

So, here is ‘The Fourth Revolution’ in 10 points:

the Fourth Revolution changes the world as we know it fundamentally: our society, our institutions, the way we live… as much as society was transformed between the Agricultural and the Industrial Age;
The Fourth Revolution root cause is cheap long distance interactive communication capabilities; that’s new and unprecedented;
the Fourth Revolution will take a few decades to spread completely, yet it changes our world quickly already, and we need to change ourselves now to thrive through it;
The Fourth Revolution development will be difficult and possibly painful at times. Yet overall, the development of humankind will allow more people to contribute to our collective cognitive capability, changing the world ultimately for the better;
The value creation capability of the Collaborative Age is orders of magnitude higher than Manufacturing or Agriculture, the latter activities will become subsidized;
The organization will become open and fluid – open to the influence of the outside, to a network of followers, a turbulent succession of temporary projects;
The prevailing leadership style will be ‘mutual learning’ leadership. The leader is not any more the person who knows the way, he is the one who catalyzes the group;
The leaders of the Collaborative Age will be the nomad K.E.E.Ns (Knowledge Exchanging Enhancing Networkers). They will drive their own career, and are fully nomadic;
It is possible to be happy being a farmer or working in a factory. It is a choice. The worst is not to make any choice. Choose now whether to lean or not into the Fourth Revolution;
On an unprecedented scale, each of us can change the world. The world can shaped the way we want, let’s do it now!

Of course each of these bullet points warrants a full development, which is exactly the purpose of the book…

Would you have additional bullet points to add?

Practice feedforward

Do you know what feedforward is?

It has been invented by Marshall Goldsmith, a well-known coach we’ve encountered already in this blog (if you haven’t already, read “avoiding no, but, however – and change your life”).

It is very powerful. And simple. Feedforward is the contrary to feedback. Instead of looking backwards in the past to uncover what could have been done better, feedforward is used to look into the future and give advice and opinion about how to make something work well.

Feedforward works very well at the beginning of a project, or with someone you don’t know. Explain the project, the intent. Ask the person to give a feedforward, an advice of what to do / how to make it successful / how to improve. Listen intently. And don’t debate. Just note and say thank you.

You would not believe how powerful feedforward can be. Try it this week at the first occasion!

Still skeptical about the Fourth Revolution? Read this post, and experience it firsthand!

Have you seen this video on TED? “What we learned from 5 million books” video on TED.

The idea is dead simple but only the Fourth Revolution would allow it. Based on Google’s now huge and unprecendented database of scanned books, researchers have setup a tool that looks for the frequency of words depending on the date of publication.

The 5 million of books they use as a basis is quite a representative sample (4%) of the 129 million books ever published.

Not only that, but the tool is available online at http://books.google.com/ngrams, an interactive tool that lets you test your own words or combination of words, and look at how they evolve over time. I can testify that you can spend some time playing with it (and that’s an understatement). I just put here three examples I have done myself – all graphs range from 1800 to 2008

In the first example, using the frequency of the words “farmer”, “worker”, “employee”, “servant” and “slave”, we see how the concept of servant (yellow) disappears over time, while “workers” (red) and “employees” (green) are newer concepts.

In the second example, with the words “spiritual”, “intellectual” and “emotional”, we see how the frequency of “spiritual” diminishes after 1860, while “emotional” is quite a new word growing through the 20th century.

In the third example, we just watch the Fourth Revolution ignite, with the words “collaborative” and “networking”:

collaborative networking n-gram — collaborative networking chart

The incredible thing is that you can yourself do your own research, because the data from the 5 million books (approximately 500 billion words!!) is there, at the reach of your mouse, anywhere in the world.

I write about the Fourth Revolution but that does not mean I am not WOW’d by it regularly. WOW! Try it yourself on Google n-grams interactive site. And watch – the more this tool will become known, the more people will use its graphs to illustrate historical tendencies. Private people will do their own research. Humankind’s collective cognitive capability will be unleashed.

What a better illustration of the Fourth Revolution? This would have just been impossible 2 years ago. WOW.

Open leadership – giving up control is inevitable

As the Fourth Revolution grows and spreads, giving up control is inevitable.

Leaders cannot any more control everything that is being done in the organization. Organizations cannot control any more their market as they used to do (for example, spending millions on advertising and measuring a constant return on investment)…

Charlene Li mentions the 3 levers of change – the 3 levers of the Fourth Revolution, pushing unavoidable change:

there are more and more people online
social networking sites usage is becoming extremely widespread
sharing is a rising habit

To that we need to add that with mobile technologies, employees stay connected to their own virtual world even when they are in office.

Do you want your organization to create more value? So, give up control! Stop barring access to social networks in the office! Real valuable work is anyway today not any more just dumb repetitive production, it is Creative, Emotional Work. Just allow it.

Open leadership – practical leadership of the Fourth Revolution

I highly recommend ‘Open Leadership’ by Charlene Li. The book is about how social technology transforms leadership in organizations.

She tackles many issues we have already discussed in this blog, and she provides a number of practical examples that are really enlightening. What’s really good about the book, actually, is how practical it is, and how she shows the struggles of executives with a more open leadership style.

She also provides practical way forward, showing how social network strategy needs to be aligned with the organization’s strategy. It is possible to embrace social networks within pre-defined limits. She shows how to define and enforce these limits, and how to take advantage of the value of the Fourth Revolution while minimizing risk – personal, and for the organization.

We will discuss some striking ideas particularly in some following posts. Today let’s reflect on this quote

“Open leadership is how leaders must let go to succeed”

That’s real. It is about how to let go old-fashioned control to influence the organization at a higher level. Letting go is hard. Let’s help our leaders understand that they have to let go. Or they will get run over by the Fourth Revolution’s speeding train.

When do you let go of your old all-controlling-closed leadership style?

6 key practices to leverage the value of Fourth Revolution communities

In the previous blog about “How the Fourth Revolution dramatically increases humankind problem-solving ability”, we’ve observed a great case-study of how leveraging the Fourth Revolution contribution capabilities led to a quick and effective solution to an unsolved problem.

What can we learn from this example on the conditions for this to happen?

Here are 6 key conditions:

have a large enough community because the percentage of people that are going to involve themselves deeply is small (the minimum size of the community depends on their initial level of engagement, but is at least a few thousand members). That might take some time to build up, which means giving out for some time as an investment; and any pre-existing network is clearly an asset;
make sure the community has an emotional engagement into the topic (due to personal or family history, the particular topic, or make the medium addictive in itself), and that the topic has a lot of meaning to them – aligned with their self-purpose;
allow the community members to communicate with each other transversely;
offer recognition to great community members contributions (not only external recognition: internal recognition inside the community is also appropriate); even better, allow community people to rate each other’s contributions;
interact with the community by responding in a reactive manner to issues and questions so as not to lest unwanted issues fester;
provide regularly challenging, unconventional problems that tie with the sense of meaning of the community.

Do the community network that you hope to leverage follow these 6 guidelines? What can you do today to improve the health of your network and benefit from the Fourth Revolution value?

How the Fourth Revolution dramatically increases humankind problem-solving ability

Fourth Revolution minded researchers use online games to solve difficult scientific problems by appealing to a much larger community of contributors.

The best example to date can be found in the article “gamers solve molecular puzzle that baffled scientists”.

By crowdsourcing the search for the best 3-D molecular configuration they were able to get the help and support from a large community. By making it like a game, they leveraged an emotional appeal to the effort. And they solved a previously unsolvable problem in only 10 days!

This example is particularly noteworthy because anyone – no need to have any knowledge in molecular physics – can play the game. But don’t believe it is an isolated case. Such competitions and game are spreading through all disciplines now, to leverage contribution from anywhere in the world.

What is always amazing, though, is that at the end, the number of really dedicated, passionate contributors is always very small – no more than a dozen or a few dozen. But because the tools attracts talent from around the world, the best suitable, available people are there. And from their kitchen, stay-at-home moms can contribute to the progress of science.

Also noteworthy in the article is how the final discovery built on top of the progress made by other members, and how the small community of dedicated hard-core members is deeply in conversation. The lone genius concept is definitely obsolete.

Welcome to social community-based science.

Welcome to the Fourth Revolution’s value and knowledge production system.

The history of crowdfunding – the Fourth Revolution in action

I have had quite a few reactions from the blog post on Kiva.org, or how we can give money to needy individuals at the other end of the world.

That’s called crowdfunding.

Here is a link to an interesting post about the history of crowdfunding: the history and evolution of crowdfunding.

It shows how experiments are now following each other, more and more frequently, that allow small amounts of money to change hands, without the intermediary of a large organization (and its bureaucracy, risk-adversity, etc). Just because the Fourth Revolution provides us with unprecedented human interaction capability.

Will crowdfunding overtake the Industrial Age conventional financial institutions? For the moment it is rather complementary, a small scale solution to small scale problems that are overlooked by conventional institutions. Still, crowdfunding will become very important for many people. This is only the start!

Crowdfunding adds a layer of possibility on top of the existing institutions. That is what will happen with many of our usual institutions as the Fourth Revolution expands. Looking forward to the crowd-institutions!

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