How Meeting in Person Remains a Need

This excellent Atlantic article addresses the question we all ponder: ‘Do We Really Need to Meet In Person?‘. Employers generally consider that some face-to-face meeting is needed in particular for creative endeavors (see our post ‘How Face-to-Face Work is Needed for Innovation‘; employees would rather stay at home and avoid commuting.

The Atlantic article takes a clear position in favor of remote work, and provides as well interesting data. In particular “The amount of meetings doubled during the pandemic“! It is true that our days have been packed with much more interactions and the need to switch from one topic to the other.

On the other hand, I observe since we have been able to meet again with people in person, how rich those encounters are compared to remote meetings. From informal exchanges around coffee to the enhanced environment of discussion, reading body language cues and understanding the working environment of people you meet.

In particular for all commercial and business development aspects, face-to-face meetings still remain much more powerful than remote meetings in conveying messages and conviction.

I have also observed that for audits and reviews, there is much more to be captured when working in the office being reviewed than remotely, and it remains essential to travel on site to provide a good quality analysis and feedback.

I am convinced that while remote work will certainly increase compared to pre-Covid time, face-to-face work is also here to stay and develop. We will have to learn what method works best for which purpose.

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How The Covid Crisis Is Leading to a Historical Shift in Employment

The future of the workplace is one of the big question marks at this time. Plenty of people write and contribute on this topic. In a series of posts we will explore some of those thoughts. First, on the basis of this Capitalogix blog post ‘The Rise Of Remote Work‘, let’s just observe how prevalent remote work is becoming.

This post – based on US data – shows that after the pandemic-driven transformation, remote work is appreciated by people and particularly in some industries, software & IT being of course the main adopter.

The shift in how people work is translating in what is called “the great resignation” with many people moving out of more traditional employment and changing industry. This excellent Atlantic article dated October 2021 ‘The Great Resignation Is Accelerating‘ provides data on this historical migration and changes in worker expectations. This affects in particular the hospitality industry (hotels and restaurants), but also many other industries.

I love however the conclusion of the post: “The culture of work is in a massive period of transformation. Regardless of where your specific company or industry ends up, all businesses will have to increase the amount of employee care they provide. Just as the heart of AI is still human, so is the heart of our businesses.” The point is that employee expectations about life quality has risen, and organizations have to adapt.

The Covid crisis has unexpected effects on the employment market. It is certainly only an acceleration of existing trends. Still, it will require a lot of adaptation capability for organizations.

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How to Increase the Effectiveness of Infrastructure Projects in Developed Countries

Following up from our previous post ‘How Infrastructure Projects Cost Has Increased Dramatically in Developed Countries‘, what can be done to make those projets more effective, quicker and less costly? I believe that new approaches to authorization process, construction and project execution could be a response.

Societal requirements and expectations will continue to make it harder to settle land claims and manage stakeholder input into very large projects, which will always have their share of opponents. However, while still maintaining the rights of stakeholders, it should still be possible to accelerate the regulatory authorization process, in particular by accelerating and remove some layers of legal recourse. It has been done in France for example for offshore wind farms after the previous regulatory framework was found to create excessive delays before the project could start.

At the same time, construction approaches should be reviewed. It makes increasingly more sense in development countries to modularise projects instead of looking for stick-and-build approaches or any approach with high manual work. For example for piping, replacing large quantities of on-site welding with pre-fabrication including of modules that could then be poured in the reinforced concrete structures.

In any case, the delays and hurdles to build infrastructure projects hurt the economy and create substantial delays before the infrastructure we need is actually contributing to our well-being. Innovative and creative solutions must be developed and implemented – we can’t continue on the current trend.

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How Infrastructure Projects Cost Has Increased Dramatically in Developed Countries

This VOX article poses a great question ‘Why does it cost so much to build things in America?‘ in the context of infrastructure and mass transit construction. This can be generalized probably to all developed countries, with some differences: why has it become (relatively) so expensive to build infrastructure in those countries?

“Research by New York Federal Reserve Bank and Brown University researchers reveals that the cost to construct a “lane mile of interstate increased five-fold” between 1990 and 2008. New construction — widening and building interchanges and building new sections of road altogether — is where the bulk of the problem lies“

Reasons mentioned beyond the density of those locations where infrastructure are being built include institutional reasons (in particular, more power given to opposing groups leading to complaints and lawsuits). The article also mentions the lack of experience of government agencies and construction companies due to the lack of construction in the last decades. I personally suspect also financing mechanisms – long projects like infrastructure will get heavily burdened by financial costs if the government does not step in for part of the financing.

In any case, it is certainly the accumulation of layers of requirements in developed countries that lead to substantial delays and even more substantial increase in cost for transportation and other infrastructure building. This is a concern for our societies that need to be overcome if we want to remain competitive.

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How Civility Becomes an Explicit Expectation in Society

This Gapingvoid rant ‘Want to be a better human?‘ brings back the issue of civility (as in “civilized conduct (especially: courtesy or politeness) or a polite act or expression” [Wikipedia]). It is not the first time I hear about the explicit comeback of this simple concept, which before was quite an implicit assumption of social life.

“As organizations shuffle from minority to minority, demonstrating how much they care & how inclusive they are, what is completely overlooked is the unsexy conversation about being nice, respectful, and kind, treating others fairly, and a hundred other courtesies that our moms taught us, or should have.”

I can’t more agree with this statement. It is a pity that people need to be reminded of their duty about civility explicitly, still is a a foundation of life in society and preempts any debate a difference and discrimination.

Maybe it is worth reminding more broadly about civility, what it means, how it is practiced. That we need to do it, however, shows the failure of both family and school to bring a minimum of social skills to people.

Let’s thus be more explicitly require civility and explain what it means. This is a minimum for social interaction and if it needs to be explicit so be it!

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How The Unregulated Industry of Life Coaches Raises Questions

This Guardian article ‘I’m a life coach, you’re a life coach: the rise of an unregulated industry‘ explains very well the inherent contradictions of the status of life coach. It is completely unregulated and dominated by a number of well-known figures of sometimes questionable reputation (as exposed in the article). It also obviously responds to a societal need, but isn’t it dangerous to let people getting influenced by unqualified professionals?

Trainings and certifications are diverse in quality and seriousness. The number of candidates to become life coach increases dramatically with each major crisis. In my experience, many do explore this career out of a personal need first, before looking at it as a way to change others for the better. In reality, many life coaches do have a less-than-ideal personal life and happiness, although they try to project a well-balanced impression.

There are drawbacks to a too severe professional certification scheme. It creates institutions that decide what is right from wrong. It can lead to situations where innovative or radical approaches will be rejected while they can be useful. Thus it is not necessarily the best solution in all cases.

At the same time when it comes to mental health, is it reasonable to add a layer of simili-professionalism to general advice on how to feel better? Having a coach implies some seriousness in the commitments taken, but one of the most important functions of a coach is to determine when people need more professional psychological help. It is unsure that all life coach trainings include that element so clearly.

I am definitely in favor of some self-regulation of the life coach industry. The ICF (International Coach Federation) is quite a good and demanding scheme that leaves some leeway in the coaching practices. Similar certifications should be requested from your coaches.

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How AI Can Only Produce Mediocre Content

In this excellent post ‘Why AI Will Not Create Great Content Any Time Soon‘, Christopher Penn makes the point that AI can’t really be trained to make better than mediocre content. Still it can certainly create heaps of it!

The point is that AI needs to be trained, therefore it will be trained on existing content. And existing content is scrapped from the web. The post goes into detail on the origin of those training databases used to train content-generating AI. It is not a huge database, and while the people that have created them have tried to filter the worst, it mainly contains average content.

“Which means that natural language models will inherently be biased towards creating mediocre content, content that’s readable and coherent, but not compelling or unique, because that’s what the vast majority of the language is that they are trained on.”

The post continues with actual real life experiments on actual content, asking for an AI algorithm to fill-up the remainder of the text. It appears quickly that it can’t imitate unique writing styles or unique ideas.

Of course the problem is that AI generated content can be produced much more easily and may flood media, drowning the best content. On the other hand, people have learned where to find unique content so for the foreseeable future, as long as your content is unique in terms of style and content, AI will not be able to imitate you!

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How Robot Clusters Are Increasingly Effective

This MIT post ‘“Particle robot” works as a cluster of simple units‘ describes a research project about very simple robots working in clusters to undertake jointly substantial tasks such as moving objects or moving about jointly.

I tend to believe that exploiting cluster behavior of relatively simple robots is probably one of the most innovative applications of robotics and that it will transform approaches focusing today on large machines. Progress of research in this field is also essential to understand the behavior of natural clusters of birds and other animals.

“Particle robots can form into many configurations and fluidly navigate around obstacles and squeeze through tight gaps. Notably, none of the particles directly communicate with or rely on one another to function, so particles can be added or subtracted without any impact on the group. In their paper, the researchers show particle robotic systems can complete tasks even when many units malfunction.”

The best feature of clusters is certainly resilience to the loss or destruction of one component while still be able to continue the mission. In civilian and military applications, clusters will certainly develop to address dangerous situations where resilience is paramount.

Robot clusters will certainly be a common feature in a decade from now, and it is essential to keep up with this interesting development.

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How Robot Chefs Start Selling Food To Go

In this excellent post ‘The New Top Chef‘ Alex Tabarrok explains how “During the pandemic a pasta restaurant launched on UberEats in Paris. Cala quickly attracted a top 1% rating for it’s high quality to price ratio. Only now has it been revealed that the chef is a robot“.

This was actually a startup hidden behind the storefront, conducting a real blind experiment to prove its concept. This saves a bit on labour and also mainly on real estate as mentioned in this article: ““With three metres squared, we can serve 1.2k meals an hour,” says Richard. “A traditional McDonald’s restaurant is 125m2, and usually they can serve 550 meals an hour.”

This gives a glimpse of a future where the preparation of common food will increasingly be automated to support delivery or on-the-spot consumption, while competition between restaurants will be increasingly on fancy food and great atmosphere. The price gap between various options can be expected increase, while labour will move from burger-flipping to service and delivery.

The advent of robot-chefs is just a visible change that automatization will bring to our daily lives. Are you ready for it?

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How Luck Plays An Essential Role in Success

This interesting BBC post ‘The dirty secret about success‘ puts back the subject of luck to the forefront. In computer experiments simulating social interactions and including random luck factors, luck was identified as a major parameter of social success.

Luck, Fortune, And Chance

“Very often, the most successful people are moderately talented but very lucky“. “Italian researchers] used a computer simulation of success defined by financial wealth to show that the most successful people in the world aren’t necessarily the most talented. They are the luckiest.” As a result, the researchers have proposed ways to improve reward based on talent rather than actual luck.

I am a student of luck as I am certain it defines a large number of outcomes (see for example previous posts ‘What Luck is Really About‘ or ‘How We Constantly Underestimate the Role of Luck in Our Lives‘). It certainly plays an important role, and at the same time we can’t just wait to see what luck brings us.

Luck is important and should not be neglected. One of the limits of the approach though is that nowadays, success more often happens in teams rather than individually. How to account for collective luck, at several scales (individual / team / organization / society?). Certainly a topic for further research!

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How Becoming Nimble With Change is an Essential Competency

In this post ‘Becoming Nimble at Dealing with Ever-Changing Plans‘, Leo Babauta expands on our difficulties to adjust in a world changing increasingly quickly. The ability to be nimble is an essential competency today (and I am still personally working on it!)

He shares some principles to reflect upon:

  • Every change is a training
  • Use changes to stay present
  • Learn to relax with uncertainty
  • Practice flowing with changes
  • You can find focus in chaos, with practice
  • Structure is very helpful, but don’t be attached
  • Finding joy in the middle of the storm

Developing this competency is certainly essential in an accelerating world where plans change. The Covid situation has added another layer or unpredictability in particular when it comes to travel or work plans. Let’s get better at it!

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How To Overcome the Moral Link Between Value and Effort

Seth Godin in this post ‘Labor and value‘ reminds us of the various historical theories about value. In particular, the Marxist ‘labor theory of value‘ stating that value is proportional to the amount of labor (cost) gone into it. This theory however still provides a kind of moral limit to the value (price) we propose.

Having an estimate of value independent of cost is difficult to understand in business: I still have a tendency when I sell a product or service to believe that its value (price) should be somewhat correlated to the effort (cost) that has gone into it. This consideration is almost a moral statement: it is based on the consideration that it would not be fair to charge for significantly more than the direct effort gone into the item or service.

However, this thinking is quite wrong, for three reasons:

  • Value lies in the eye of the beholder, or the client (informed by the market / competition and its own needs). What I propose may have much more or quite less value for it than the effort that has gone into it. Selling for a large value (price) something that has taken not so much effort to build will pay for other services or products that I can’t sell for such a high price (such as new innovative product that are looking for their proper form to produce value for clients)
  • In addition to the direct cost or effort, we must consider that our product or service is also the result of years of practice and learning, and that a large part of the value is actually indirect value of this significant investment, and not just direct effort (this is particularly visible with new clients where we can often deliver huge value for very little effort just by bringing to bear our knowledge)
  • If we don’t sell at the right market price reflecting actual value, we will be in a weaker financial situation compared to competitors, thus impeding our capability to develop innovative products or services (still, it is good to sell slightly less that competitors to increase market share!)

In the end we should overcome the moral imperative of linking value with effort. Everyone values things differently, and this diversity is promoting innovation.

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