How Our Worldview Can Change In Days after Years of Stagnation

I like this amusing little post by Tyler Cowen “World 2.0 — “There are decades where nothing happens, and weeks where decades happen”

Just a reminder how our worldview can change in a few days after having remained stuck for years.

Beyond the fun, this serves to remind us that in nature, the main shifts happen in a catastrophic and sudden manner. Hours of flooding will change more the riverbed than years of flowing, earthquakes or volcano eruptions will model the ground more than years of slow shifts… And this is a common characteristics of all complex systems.

A stable world and civilisation is an illusion, and change always happens suddenly. Let’s get up to it.

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How Fast Our Worldview Can Change

One thing I found interesting with the Covid-19 crisis is how quick our worldview can change. I got caught too: one day it seemed quite ludicrous to envisage that we would be submitted to confinement (and the economic consequences of such a decision), and less than one week later it was the most sensible thing to do.

This crisis is not anything that we as humankind should not know how to manage: there have been many before, and there will be many in the future too. Lessons learnt and practices are available. Models of contamination exist. Quarantine as a concept is quite old. For example, in 1918 there were already instructions about how to make individual masks, like today.

And we got caught because we don’t have the individual memory of such an event. The collective memory was not sufficient.

Still we collectively managed to change our worldview, our way of living and working, often in less than a week. And after some adjustment, most of us live through this crisis in a reasonable manner.

We thus seem to remain quite adaptable, individually and collectively, when circumstances so require. And quite fast too. That’s rather good news in the face of the increasing volatile world we will be facing in the next decades.

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How We Now Realize What VUCA Really Means

The VUCA concept has been trendy for a while to describe the modern complex world: Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous. I am not quite sure all of those that used this term really understood what it meant. The Covid-19 pandemics has provided an interesting example and probably a realization for many!

We actually should not be astonished by such events in the modern world. Because of globalisation any such events becomes global much more quickly than before. This crisis will probably go down in history books as one of the fastest spreading crisis throughout the world, where worldviews and appreciation of the situation have changed drastically from one day to the next. Still, there have been such crisis before and there will be in the future. Only, changes happen now much faster and in a more unpredictable manner.

When spirits will get quieter after the crisis, we’ll certainly see that the global economy was ready anyway for a shake-up as it does every decade or so. The Covid-19 was a strong initiator, more so because of the impact of the initial event. New equilibrium will be found for a few years, with probably western democracies weakened compared to Asia. As any catastrophic event, it will lead to a new world stability model – for a while only.

The funny thing is really that the proponents of VUCA got probably overwhelmed too by the violence of the crisis. Welcome to the collaborative age!

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How the Modern World Is Actually More Resilient in the Face of Catastrophic Events

With the Covid-19 pandemics there have been a lot of comments on the fragility of modern economies when they face such a disruption. I don’t agree. Of course there are severe consequences, but I believe that the modern world is actually must more robust than it would have been decades ago when facing such an event.

Some examples which struck me.

Supply chains have been disrupted it is true, but global supply chains have also helped fight the virus and deliver equipment between China and other countries, and vice-versa. And supply chain is not really going to be disrupted for long. After a few days or weeks, new chains will be in place for the industry. Many large industrial concerns are still producing; reasons for stoppage were more related to the protection of employees.

Modern transportation has allowed in France to easily transfer sick people between regions to alleviate hospital load.

Despite the confinement, the economy has not stopped as much as it would have a few years ago, thanks to the modern capability for remote work. Many companies and organisations have carried on.

Governments in Europe have taken measures to protect employees and people from the worst short term economic impact from the crisis.

And overall (this still remains to be confirmed), the action of most governments will lead to much less fatalities than would have been the case some decades ago.

Of course the pandemics is a terrible blow to the world and its economy, but we will certainly observe that it will be far more resilient than we expect.

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How We Get Always Surprised by Exponential Growth – But We Shouldn’t

The fact that exponential growth is not intuitive has already been discussed several time in this blog (e.g. ‘Why the Fourth Revolution is the Era of the Exponential, and How this Changes Everything‘, or ‘The Exponential and the Black Swan: The Counter-Intuitive World of the Fourth Revolution‘). And this lack of intuitiveness explains much of the hesitations and poor response in the face of the Covid-19 pandemics – by individual as well as politicians.

While news focused on absolute numbers, what was important was the rate of growth per day and whether it abated with confinement measures. The rash absolute rate of increase surprised everyone, just because it is so difficult to apprehend the power of exponential growth.

But that should have been so easy to compute and model. Maybe more difficult to explain to the general public, but how could decision makers get surprised? At some stage the evolution of the pandemic became quite predictable for each region.

The new Collaborative Age is indeed the age of the exponential. Exponential growth of companies and economies, and exponential growth of pandemics and catastrophic events.

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What Physical Changes Systematic Remote Work Will Create

Following up on our previous post, since the pandemic accelerates the transition towards remote work, what are the practical and physical changes we can expect?

First, houses and apartments will have to have a home office, leading to larger surfaces or different arrangements.

The equipment of households in terms of computers and tablets can also be expected to grow to at least one device per person, children included (that’s a big topic just now as schools are closed and children have to work from computers).

Since less people will commute we can expect less tension on public transportation and similar infrastructure (although there will be days where everyone will be expected to meet at the office, so some days in the work week may still be quite busy). Therefore there may be less days with significant traffic jams in large cities. Conversely there will be more tension on the internet infrastructure but that will be easier and cheaper to fix.

We can expect office times to be more like 2 or 3 days per week, letting office spaces being shared between companies or departments.

I am not quite sure there will be a visible impact on flight traffic as personal connections will still remain important and tourism can expect to still develop.

What other physical changes do you think we can we expect from this increase in remote work?

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How the Pandemic Accelerates the Move to Remote Work

The Covid-19 pandemic has really shaken the world. And it has accelerated the move towards virtual remote work. I like this title from Mitch Joel: “It Took A Global Pandemic To Change How We Work“.

While I have been practicing this work mode for years as a global consultant, many more people have found out that it can work provided there is a reasonable organisation at home to allow it. I have many contacts in large companies that discovered this mode of working for the first time, and were obliged to do that for weeks!

I am deeply convinced that in the collaborative age, we’ll still have face-to-face meetings but we will also work increasingly from home or remotely.

The key, I believe, is to know each other physically if possible before starting to collaborate virtually. Although that may not even be fully true as long as there has been some one-to-one personal interaction on an emotional level before, and that can also be through some remote video meetings.

And this will also mean some profound changes in architecture: home offices will become a must and not any more an option.

Welcome to the age of remote work!

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How to Overcome the Dilemma of Getting Stuff Done and still Be Kind to Oneself

The post by Leo Babauta ‘How to Be Kind to Yourself & Still Get Stuff Done‘ resonates much with me, because it is a dilemma I am struggling with on a daily basis. I generally consider that effort is required to get things done, and tend not to be too kin don myself as a result of my drive.

“This is the fear, when people start being kind to themselves — that they’ll be too soft, they won’t get stuff done, they’ll let themselves off the hook too easily, they’ll just lie around doing nothing.”

Leo Babauta reminds us why kindness to self is so important. He often finds “that almost all of our barriers are self-imposed — we are harsh on ourselves, and it makes everything much more difficult“. Having compassion for oneself, and concentrating on doing things that are good for oneself, is the key to overcoming this dilemma.

I like this idea that if one is too hard on oneself, maybe it is also because what we are trying to do may be a bit harmful.

I’ll try to be a bit kinder to myself in the future, while still trying to get stuff done. It’s a good way to focus on what’s good for me too.

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How Heresy May be the Symptom of Innovation

Paul Graham‘s post on ‘Novelty and Heresy‘ is worth reading. as it reminds us that “If you discover something new, there’s a significant chance you’ll be accused of some form of heresy“.

“One common way for a good idea to be non-obvious is for it to be hidden in the shadow of some mistaken assumption that people are very attached to“. This leads to being treated as an heretic.

The point may be to figure out what is that assumption that people are very much attached to. I also tend to believe that this kind of discovery, while it is a risk, is also an opportunity as it opens an understanding of the world that won’t be shared by many people until it will become mainstream – and thus may become a competitive advantage.

Paul Graham suggests to look for heresies to identify truly new ideas. Taboos are possible sources of great innovation or at least a starting point to put in question commonly held assumptions.

And since truths have a half-life, what’s true today may not be true in a few decades therefore heresy today may be mainstream in a few decades too!

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How Scientific Truths Need a Generation of Researchers to Pass Away to Be Overturned

Following on our previous post ‘How Facts and Truths Have a (Short) Half-Life‘ and some insights from the book ‘The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date‘ by Samuel Arbesman, one interesting aspect is to observe how much a usual half-life for scientific ‘truth’. It turns out often to be one generation, or approximately 50 years.

The reason is simple: it takes the mandarins and opinion- and career-making professors to disappear naturally for new ideas to take ground.

“Two Australian surgeons found that half of the facts in that field also become false every forty – five years . As the French scientists noted , all of these results verify the first half of a well – known medical aphorism by John Hughlings Jackson , a British neurologist in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries : “ It takes 50 years to get a wrong idea out of medicine , and 100 years a right one into medicine . ” This means that despite the ever – expanding growth of scientific knowledge , the publication of new articles , refutations of existing theories , the bifurcations of new fields into multiple subfields , and the messy processes of grant – writing and – funding in academia , there are measurable ways in which facts are overturned and our knowledge is ever renewed . I’m not simply extrapolating from this half – life of medicine to argue that all of science is like this . Other studies have been performed about the half – lives of different types of scientific knowledge as well“

So if you are in a field where you uncover a new ‘truth’ but this cannot be heard by whoever is the old guy in charge of your career, either you conform, or you have to go outside the institution and use it for yourself.

With a quicker developing world, this limit of 50 years half-life for scientific truth may become quite a problem! Maybe some age limit on researchers may be a good idea?

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How Facts and Truths Have a (Short) Half-Life

I loved reading the book ‘The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date‘ by Samuel Arbesman. It is a great reminder that whatever we believe is the truth today will probably not be the truth tomorrow – and that there are some rules about how those truths disappear and are replaced.

“Facts change all the time . Smoking has gone from doctor recommended to deadly . Meat used to be good for you , then bad to eat , then good again ; now it’s a matter of opinion“

“It turns out that facts , when viewed as a large body of knowledge , are just as predictable . Facts , in the aggregate , have half – lives : We can measure the amount of time for half of a subject’s knowledge to be overturned . There is science that explores the rates at which new facts are created , new technologies are developed , and even how facts spread . How knowledge changes can be understood scientifically“

It is a great reminder that in our complex world, whatever we contemplate to be true is only relative to our time and situation, and that every truth is quite a relative statement. Those that stick to old-fashioned truth simply because it was the truth at the time it was identified as such and formalized may not have realized how relative that notion can be.

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How the Horizon of Investors in Startups is Not Always Compatible With Their Development Cycle

Following up from our previous post ‘How Venture Capitalists Don’t Really Play the Role We Believe‘, I also observe as a Business Angel that the typical 5 to 7 years’ time expectation of investors, and investment funds in particular, is not always consistent with the time-frame for developing an innovative company.

As a Business Angel with industry experience I have a specific tendency to invest in start-ups that develop tangible innovative products mostly in B2B situations. For those start-up companies, between developing the technology in a sufficiently mature stage, the decision cycle of industrial managers and the time to effectively setup the hardware, the usual investment cycle of 5 to 7 years will often be too short to demonstrate the full value of the company. A horizon on the order of 10 years may be more realistic.

The 5 to 7 years horizon may be more suitable to virtual products in B2C mode and effectively in that space, this time-frame is often sufficient to show the value of the innovation.

I am a bit unclear whether this difference in startup situation is well appreciated by investors and there may be many cases where industrial start-ups will be forced to take decisions that are not supportive of their development after 5 to 7 years because many investors will want to leave at that point.

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