Author Archives: Greg Satell

About Greg Satell

Greg Satell is a popular speaker and consultant. His latest book, Cascades: How to Create a Movement That Drives Transformational Change, is available now. Follow his blog at Digital Tonto or on Twitter @Digital Tonto.

Why Stupid Questions Are Important to Innovation

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Why Stupid Questions Are Important to Innovation

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

16 year-old girl Gracie Cunningham created a firestorm recently when she posted a video to TikTok asking “is math real?” More specifically, she wanted to know why ancient mathematicians came up with algebraic concepts such as “y=mx+b.” “What would you need it for?” she asked, when they didn’t even have plumbing.

The video went viral on twitter, gathering millions of views and the social media universe immediately pounced, with many ridiculing how stupid it was. Mathematicians and scientists, however, felt otherwise and remarked how profound her questions were. Cornell’s Steve Strogatz even sent her a thoughtful answer to her question.

We often overlook the value of simple questions, because we think intelligence has something to do with ability to recite rote facts. Yet intellect is not about knowing all the answers, but in asking better questions. That’s how we expand knowledge and gain deeper understanding. In fact, the most profound answers often come from seemingly silly questions.

What Would It Be Like to Ride on a Bolt of Lightning?

Over a century ago, a teenage boy not unlike Gracie Cunningham asked a question that was seemingly just as silly as hers. He wanted to know what it would be like to ride on a bolt of lightning shining a lantern forward. Yet much like Gracie’s, his question belied a deceptive profundity. You see, a generation earlier, the great physicist James Clerk Maxwell published his famous equations which established that the speed of light was constant.

To understand why the question was so important, think about riding on a train that’s traveling at 40 miles an hour and tossing a ball forward at 40 miles an hour. To you, the ball appears to be traveling at 40 miles an hour, but to someone standing still outside the train the ball would appear to be going 80 miles an hour (40+40).

So now you can see the problem with riding on a bolt of lightning with a lantern. According to the principle by which the ball on the train appears to be traveling at 80 miles an hour, the light from the lantern should be traveling at twice the speed of light. But according to Maxwell’s equations, the speed of light is fixed.

It took Albert Einstein 10 years to work it all out, but in 1905, he published his theory of special relativity, which stated that, while the speed of light is indeed constant, time and space are relative. As crazy as that sounds, you only need to take a drive in your car to prove it’s true. GPS satellites are calibrated according to Einstein’s equations, so if you get to where you want to go you have, in a certain sense, proved the special theory of relativity.

A bit later Einstein asked another seemingly silly question about what it would be like to travel in an elevator in space, which led him to his general theory of relativity.

Who Shaves the Barber’s Beard?

Around the time young Albert Einstein was thinking about riding on a bolt of lightning, others were pondering an obscure paradox about a barber, which went something like this:

If the barber shaves every man who does not shave himself, who shaves the barber?

If he shaves himself, he violates the statement and if he doesn’t shave himself, he also violates the statement.

Again, like Gracie’s question, the barber’s paradox seems a bit silly and childish. In reality it is a more colloquial version of Russell’s paradox about sets that are members of themselves, which shook the foundations of mathematics a century ago. Statements, such as 2+2=4, are supposed to be either true or false. If contradictions could exist, it would represent a massive hole at the center of logic.

Eventually, the crisis came to a head and David Hilbert, the greatest mathematician of the age, created a program of questions that, if answered in the affirmative, would resolve the dilemma. To everyone’s surprise, in short order, a young scholar named Kurt Gödel would publish his incompleteness theorems, which showed that a logical system could be either complete or consistent, but not both.

Put more simply, Gödel proved that every logical system would always crash. It was only a matter of time. Logic would remain broken forever. However, there was a silver lining to it all. A few years later, Alan Turing would build on Gödel’s work in his paper on computability, which itself would usher in the new era of modern computing.

Why Can’t Our Immune System Kill Cancer Cells?

The idea that our immune system could attack cancer cells doesn’t seem that silly on the surface. After all, it not only regularly kills other pathogens, such as bacteria, viruses and, in some cases, such as with autoimmune disorders like multiple sclerosis, lupus and rheumatoid arthritis, even attacks our own cells. Why would it ignore tumors?

Yet as Charles Graeber explains in his recent book, The Breakthrough, for decades most of the medical world dismissed the notion. Yes, there had been a few scattered cases in which cancer patients who had a severe infection had seen their tumors disappear, but every time they tried to design an actual cancer therapy based on immune response it failed miserably.

The mystery was eventually solved by a scientist named Jim Allison who, in 1995, had an epiphany. Maybe, he thought, that the problem wasn’t that our immune system can’t identify and attack cancer cells, but rather that the immune response is impeded somehow. He figured if he could block that process, it would revolutionize cancer care.

Today, cancer immunotherapy is considered to be the 4th pillar of cancer treatment and nobody questions whether our immune system can be deployed to fight cancer. Jim Allison won the Nobel Prize for his work in 2018.

The Power of a Question

Answers are easy. They resolve matters. Questions are harder. They point out gaps in our knowledge and inadequacies in our understanding. They make us uncomfortable. That’s why we are so apt to dismiss them altogether. So we can go about our business unhindered.

So it shouldn’t be surprising that young Gracie Cunningham’s TikTok garnered such strong reactions. It’s much easier to dismiss questions as silly than to take them on. That’s why Einstein was reduced to working in a patent office rather than at a university, why so many dismissed Russell’s paradox as meaningless and why Jim Allison had doors shut in his face for three years before he found a company willing to invest in his idea.

Yet what should also be obvious by now is that there is enormous value in raising questions that challenge things that we think we already know. Before questions were raised, it seemed obvious that time and space are absolute, that logical statements are either true or false and that our immune system can’t fight cancer.

The truth is that great innovators are not necessarily smarter, harder working or more ambitious than anyone else, but rather those who are constantly looking for new questions to ask and new problems to solve.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credit: Pixabay

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Five Myths That Kill Change and Transformation

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Five Myths That Kill Change and Transformation

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

I first became interested in transformation in the fall of 2004. I was managing a leading news organization in Kyiv, Ukraine when the Orange Revolution broke out. It was an amazing thing to witness and experience. Seemingly overnight, a habitually dormant populace suddenly rose up and demanded change.

One of the things that struck me at the time is how no one really knew what was going on or what would happen next—not the journalists I spoke to in the newsroom every day, not the other business leaders and certainly not the political leaders. Anyone with any conventional form of power seemed to have completely lost their ability to shape events.

That’s what started me on my 15 year-long journey to understand how transformation works that led to my book, Cascades. What I found was that many traditional notions about change management are not only wrong, but they can also actually kill a transformational effort even before it really starts. Here are five myths that you need to avoid if you want to bring change about.

Myth #1: You Need to Get Off to a Fast Start

Traditionally, managers launching a new initiative have aimed to start big. They work to gain approval for a sizable budget as a sign of institutional commitment, recruit high-profile executives, arrange a big “kick-off” meeting and look to move fast, gain scale and generate some quick wins. All of this is designed to create a sense of urgency and inevitability.

That may work for a conventional project, but for something that’s truly transformational, it’s a sure path to failure. Starting off with a big bang will often provoke fear and resistance among those who aren’t yet on board. Real, lasting change always starts with small groups, loosely connected, united by a shared purpose.

A much more effective strategy is to start with a keystone change that represents a concrete and tangible goal, involves multiple stakeholders and paves the way for future change. That’s how you build credibility and momentum. While the impact of that early keystone change might be limited, a small, but meaningful, initiative can show what’s possible.

For example, when the global data giant Experian sought to transform itself into a cloud-based enterprise, it started with internal API’s that had limited effect on its business. Yet those early achievements spurred on a full digital transformation. In much the same way, when Wyeth Pharmaceuticals began its shift to lean manufacturing, it started with a single process at a single plant. That led toa 25% reduction of costs across the entire firm.

Myth #2: You Need to Demand Early Commitment

Another thing that leaders often do is demand early commitment to a transformational initiative. They point out a new direction and they want everybody to get on board—or else. Any lingering questions or doubts are considered to be tantamount to disloyalty and are not tolerated.

This is silly. If an initiative really is transformational, then by definition it’s very different than what the rank and file have come to accept. If people don’t have any questions or doubts, then that means they never really believed in the organization before the transformation. They were just keeping their heads down and playing along.

Rather than demanding commitment, smart transformation initiatives start out as voluntary. By allowing people to opt-in, you are much more likely to get people who are truly enthusiastic and want things to work. That will make things much easier than wasting a lot of time and energy trying to convince people that change is a good thing.

Smart, devoted people should have questions. Certainly, you wouldn’t want people to change direction on a dime and have absolutely no doubts. At least in the beginning, you want to allow people to self-select. That’s how you ensure that people are genuinely enthusiastic and engaged, rather than just playing lip service to the idea.

Myth #3: You Have to Have a Unique Value Proposition and Differentiate Yourself

Because traditional change management programs rely so much on persuasion, they tend to borrow a lot from marketing. So the first step they often take is to differentiate the change they seek from the status quo by formulating a unique value proposition. This is almost always a mistake.

It is difference that makes people uncomfortable with change in the first place, so presenting unfamiliar concepts is a sure way to heighten resistance. Rather than focusing on differentiation, what you want to do is present change in the context of shared values.

For example, many organizations today are trying to adopt agile development techniques. Unfortunately, evangelists often start by promoting the Agile Manifesto, because that’s what makes them passionate about the idea in the first place. Yet for people outside the Agile community, the Agile Manifesto can seem strange, or even threatening.

If you want to attract people to your cause, you need to focus on shared values to create a comfortable entry point. In the case of Agile development, while most people are unfamiliar with the concepts in the Agile Manifesto, everybody understands the value of better-quality projects done faster & cheaper. As Darrell Rigby and his co-authors explain in Doing Agile Right, Agile, at its core, is really about becoming a high-performance organization.

Myth #4: You Have to Engage Your Fiercest Critics

One of the things we’re most frequently asked about in our workshops is how to persuade those who are dead set against change. The underlying assumption is that if you can come up with the right communication strategy or rhetorical flourish, anybody can be convinced of anything. That’s clearly not the case. Nobody is that clever or charming.

The truth is that if an idea is important and has real potential for impact, there will always be people who will hate it and work to undermine it in ways that are dishonest, deceptive and underhanded. You will not convince them, and you shouldn’t even try. You will just be wasting time and energy.

What you can do, however, is listen. The arguments your opposition uses will clue you in to the shared values that can bring people over to your side. For example, for a long-time people who opposed LGBTQ rights emphasized that they were defending families. It is no accident that gay marriage, with its emphasis on committed relationships and raising happy families, became the vehicle to drive the movement forward.

In a similar vein, those who oppose diversity and inclusion initiatives often do so on the grounds of performance (while strongly proclaiming that they support fairness). Yet the vast preponderance of the evidence shows that diversity improves performance. By making that case, you are tapping in a value that even your opposition has highlighted as important.

Myth #5: Transformation Is Either Top-Down or Bottom-Up

There has been a long running debate about whether change should be top-down or bottom-up. Some say that true change can only take hold if it comes from the top and is pushed through the entire organization. Others argue that you must first get buy-in from the rank-and-file before any real change can take place.

That is a false choice. For any given idea or initiative, you are likely to find both support and resistance at every level of the organization. You don’t start a movement for change by specifying who belongs and who doesn’t, you need to go out and identify your Apostles wherever you can find them.

The truth is that transformation isn’t top-down or bottom-up but moves from side-to-side. Change never happens all at once and can’t simply be willed into existence. It can only take place when people truly internalize and embrace it. The best way to do that is to empower those who already believe in change to bring in those around them.

And that reveals what is probably the most important myth of all, that creating change takes special personal qualities. One of the things that amazed me in my research was how ordinary even legendary change leaders were at the beginning (as a young lawyer, Gandhi was too shy to speak up in court). What made them different is what they learned along the way.

Transformation is always a journey, never a particular destination. So, the most important thing you can do to bring change about is simply to get started. If not now, when? If not you, who?

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credit: Unsplash

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We Must Rethink the Future of Technology

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We Must Rethink the Future of Technology

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

The industrial revolution of the 18th century was a major turning point. Steam power, along with other advances in areas like machine tools and chemistry transformed industry from the work of craftsmen and physical labor to that of managing machines. For the first time in world history, living standards grew consistently.

Yet during the 20th century, all of that technology needed to be rethought. Steam engines gave way to electric motors and internal combustion engines. The green revolution and antibiotics transformed agriculture and medicine. In the latter part of the century digital technology created a new economy based on information.

Today, we are on the brink of a new era of innovation in which we will need to rethink technology once again. Much like a century ago, we are developing new, far more powerful technologies that will change how we organize work, identify problems and collaborate to solve them. We will have to change how we compete and even redefine prosperity itself.

The End of the Digital Revolution

Over the past few decades, digital technology has become almost synonymous with innovation. Every few years, a new generation of chips would come out that was better, faster and cheaper than the previous one. This opened up new possibilities that engineers and entrepreneurs could exploit to create new products that would disrupt entire industries.

Yet there are only so many transistors you can cram onto a silicon wafer and digital computing is nearing its theoretical limits. We have just a few generations of advancements left before the digital revolution grinds to a halt. There will be some clever workarounds to stretch the technology a bit further, but we’re basically at the end of the digital era.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing. In many ways, the digital revolution has been a huge disappointment. Except for a relatively brief period in the late nineties and early aughts, the rise of digital technology has been marked by diminished productivity growth and rising inequality. Studies have also shown that some technologies, such as social media, worsen mental health.

Perhaps even more importantly, the end of the digital era will usher in a new age of heterogeneous computing in which we apply different computing architectures to specific tasks. Some of these architectures will be digital, but others, such as quantum and neuromorphic computing, will not be.

The New Convergence

In the 90s, media convergence seemed like a futuristic concept. We consumed information through separate and distinct channels, such as print, radio and TV. The idea that all media would merge into one digital channel just felt unnatural. Many informed analysts at the time doubted that it would ever actually happen.

Yet today, we can use a single device to listen to music, watch videos, read articles and even publish our own documents. In fact, we do these things so naturally we rarely stop to think how strange the concept once seemed. The Millennial generation doesn’t even remember the earlier era of fragmented media.

Today, we’re entering a new age of convergence in which computation powers the physical, as well as the virtual world. We’re beginning to see massive revolutions in areas like materials science and synthetic biology that will reshape massive industries such as energy, healthcare and manufacturing.

The impact of this new convergence is likely to far surpass anything that happened during the digital revolution. The truth is that we still eat, wear and live in the physical world, so innovating with atoms is far more valuable than doing so with bits.

Rethinking Prosperity

It’s a strange anachronism that we still evaluate prosperity in terms of GDP. The measure, developed by Simon Kuznets in 1934, became widely adopted after the Bretton Woods Conference a decade later. It is basically a remnant of the industrial economy, but even back then Kuznets commented, “the welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measure of national income.”

To understand why GDP is problematic, think about a smartphone, which incorporates many technologies, such as a camera, a video player, a web browser a GPS navigator and more. Peter Diamandis has estimated that a typical smartphone today incorporates applications that were worth $900,000 when they were first introduced.

So, you can see the potential for smartphones to massively deflate GDP. First of all, the price of the smartphone itself, which is just a small fraction of what the technology in it would have once cost. Then there is the fact that we save fuel by not getting lost, rarely pay to get pictures developed and often watch media for free. All of this reduces GDP, but makes us better off.

There are better ways to measure prosperity. The UN has proposed a measure that incorporates 9 indicators, the OECD has developed an alternative approach that aggregates 11 metrics, UK Prime Minister David Cameron has promoted a well-being index and even the small city of Somerville, MA has a happiness project.

Yet still, we seem to prefer GDP because it’s simple, not because its accurate. If we continue to increase GDP, but our air and water are more polluted, our children less educated and less healthy and we face heightened levels of anxiety and depression, then what have we really gained?

Empowering Humans to Design Work for Machines

Today, we face enormous challenges. Climate change threatens to pose enormous costs on our children and grandchildren. Hyperpartisanship, in many ways driven by social media, has created social strife, legislative inertia and has helped fuel the rise of authoritarian populism. Income inequality, at its highest levels since the 1920s, threatens to rip shreds in the social fabric.

Research shows that there is an increasing divide between workers who perform routine tasks and those who perform non-routine tasks. Routine tasks are easily automated. Non-routine tasks are not, but can be greatly augmented by intelligent systems. It is through this augmentation that we can best create value in the new century.

The future will be built by humans collaborating with other humans to design work for machines. That is how we will create the advanced materials, the miracle cures and new sources of clean energy that will save the planet. Yet if we remain mired in an industrial mindset, we will find it difficult to harness the new technological convergence to solve the problems we need to.

To succeed in the 21st century, we need to rethink our economy and our technology and begin to ask better questions. How does a particular technology empower people to solve problems? How does it improve lives? In what ways does it need to be constrained to limit adverse effects through economic externalities?

As our technology becomes almost unimaginably powerful, these questions will only become more important. We have the power to shape the world we want to live in. Whether we have the will remains to be seen.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credit: Pixabay

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What is Killing Capitalism in America?

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What is Killing Capitalism in America?

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

There’s no doubt that capitalism in America is in bad shape. Higher market share concentration in industry is leading to higher profits for corporate giants, but also to higher prices and lower wages along with decreased innovation and productivity growth as well as a long-term decline in entrepreneurship.

You would think that the rise of progressive politicians like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez would be responsible for the decline in the power of capitalism and the demise of free markets. However, a new book by NYU finance professor Thomas Philippon, titled The Great Reversal, argues exactly the opposite.

In fact, he shows through meticulous research how capitalists themselves are killing capitalism. Through the charade of “pro-business” policies, industry leaders have been increasing regulation and limiting competition over the past 20 years. We need to right the ship and return to an embrace of free markets, entrepreneurship and innovation.

A Rise in Rent Seeking and Regulatory Capture

The goal of every business is to defy markets. Any firm at the mercy of supply and demand will find itself unable to make an economic profit—that is profit over and above its cost of capital. In other words, unless a firm can beat Adam’s Smith’s invisible hand, investors would essentially be better off putting their money in the bank.

That leaves entrepreneurs and managers with two viable strategies. The first is innovation. Firms can create new and better products that produce new value. The second, rent seeking, is associated with activities like lobbying and regulatory capture, which seeks to earn a profit without creating added value. In fact, rent seeking often makes industries less competitive.

There is abundant evidence that over the last 20 years, American firms have shifted from an innovation mindset to one that focuses more on rent seeking. First and foremost, has been the marked increase in lobbying expenditures, which since 1998 have more than doubled. Firms invest money for a reason, they expect a return.

It seems like they are getting their money’s worth. Corporate tax rates in the US have steadily decreased and are now among the lowest in the developed world. Occupational licensing, often the result of lobbying by trade associations, has increased fivefold since the 1950s. Innovative firms such as Tesla face legislation that seeks to protect incumbent businesses. These restrictions have coincided with a decrease in the establishment of new firms.

Perhaps most importantly, the increasingly lax regulatory environment has resulted in a boom in mergers and acquisitions, which led to increased market power among fewer firms and increased barriers to entry for new market entrants.

The Decline of Competitive Markets

To understand how markets have died in the US, you only have to look at the airline industry. After years of mergers just four airlines control roughly two thirds of the market. Yet even that understates the problem. On individual routes, there are often only one or two competitors. We’ve all experienced the results: increasingly higher prices and worse service.

Airlines are far from an isolated case. Consider the cable industry, where consolidation has resulted in broadband prices that are almost 50% higher than in Europe. For mobile phone service, Americans are being charged more than twice what our European friends are. Across a wide swath of industries, increasing concentration is leading to lower competition.

Yet the problem is more than just Americans getting ripped off by corporations who are able to charge us more and give us less. Fat and happy industries tend to underinvest and become less competitive over time, enjoying short-term profits but putting the economic well-being of the country in serious jeopardy.

Again, there is evidence that this is exactly what’s happening. There is abundant data showing that American corporations are underinvesting, even while they have been reporting strong profits to investors.

Entrepreneurial Headwinds

With protected markets and healthy profits, recent decades have been great for incumbent businesses, but not so great for those who want to start new ones. In fact, entrepreneurship in America recently hit a 40-year low and a recent report by the Brookings Institution found that business dynamism in general has been declining since the 80s.

It’s not hard to see why. A recent study found that about half of all college students struggle with food insecurity even as tuition has risen from an average of $15,160 in 1988 to $34,740 in 2018. Not surprisingly, student debt is exploding. It has nearly tripled in the last decade. In fact student debt has become so onerous that it now takes about 20 years to pay off four years for college and even more for those who pursue a graduate degree.

So even the bright young people who don’t starve are often condemned to decades of what is essentially indentured servitude. That’s no way to run an entrepreneurial economy. In fact, a study done by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia found that student debt has a measurable negative impact on new business creation.

Another obstacle for entrepreneurs is our healthcare system which represents a huge economic burden. Consider that in the US healthcare expenditures account for roughly 18% of GDP. Most OECD countries spend roughly half that. Anyone who wants to start a business first needs to figure out where their health insurance will come from. Is it any wonder that entrepreneurship is declining in America?

Pro-Business Policies Are Often Anti-Market

The truth is that no business leader wants a free market. In fact, most of our efforts go toward tipping the playing field in our favor. Often, we do that in positive ways, such as building a trusted brand or innovating new products. Yet the incentives, if not the motivations, for rent seeking behavior are exactly the same.

For far too long pro-business lobbies have run rampant over our democracy. The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which led to essentially unrestricted political donations, has made a bad situation worse. Members of Congress now spend roughly 30 hours a week “dialing for dollars” rather than tending to the nation’s business.

And we pay the price in higher prices, stagnant wages and worse service. Where we should be investing in the future, creating better infrastructure, schools and a cleaner healthier environment, instead we are spending it on tax breaks for businesses, even though research has shown that these incentives don’t promote economic growth.

It’s time to claim capitalism back for ourselves and promote free markets, entrepreneurship, innovation and public well-being. That’s how you build competitive markets and a healthy society.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credit: Pexels

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We Must Break Free of the Engineering Mindset

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We Must Break Free of the Engineering Mindset

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

In 2014, when Silicon Valley was still largely seen as purely a force for good, George Packer wrote in The New Yorker how tech entrepreneurs tended to see politics through the lens of an engineering mindset. Their first instinct was to treat every problem as if it could be reduced down to discrete variables and solved like an equation.

Despite its romantic illusions, the digital zeitgeist merely echoed more than a century of failed attempts to generalize engineering approaches, such as scientific management, financial engineering, six sigma and shareholder value. All showed initial promise and then disappointed, in some cases catastrophically.

Proponents of the engineering mindset tend to blame its failures on poor execution. Surely, logic would suggest that as long as a set of principles are internally consistent, they should be externally relevant. Yet the problem is that reality is not simple and clear-cut, but complex and nonlinear, which is why we need be ready to adapt to the unexpected and nonsensical.

The Rise of the Engineering Mindset

In the 1920s, a group of intellectuals in Berlin and Vienna, much like many of the Silicon Valley digerati today, became enamored with the engineering mindset. By this time electricity and internal combustion had begun to reshape the world and Einstein’s theory of relativity, confirmed in 1919, had reshaped our conception of the universe. It seemed that there was nothing that scientific precision couldn’t achieve.

Yet human affairs were just as messy as always. Just a decade before Europe had blundered its way into the most horrible war in history. Social scientists still seemed no more advanced than voodoo doctors and philosophers were still making essentially the same arguments the ancient Greeks used two thousand years before.

It seemed obvious to them that human endeavors could be built on a more logical basis and saw a savior in Ludwig Wittgenstein and his Tractatus, which described a world made up of “atomic facts” that could be combined to create “states of affairs.” He concluded, famously, that “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent,” meaning that whatever could not be proved logically must be disregarded.

The intellectuals branded their movement logical positivism and based it on the principle of verificationism. Only verifiable propositions would be taken as meaningful. All other statements would be treated as silly talk and gobbledygook. Essentially, if it didn’t fit in an algorithm, it didn’t exist.

A Foundational Crisis

Unfortunately, and again much like Silicon Valley denizens of today, the exuberant confidence of the logical positivists belied serious trouble underfoot. In fact, while the intellectuals in Berlin and Vienna were trying to put social sciences on a more logical footing, logic itself was undergoing a foundational crisis.

At the root of the crisis was a strange paradox, which can be illustrated by the sentence, “The barber shaves every man who does not shave himself.” Notice the problem? If the barber shaves every man who doesn’t shave himself, then who shaves the Barber? If he shaves himself, he violates the statement and if he does not shave himself, he also violates it.

It seems a bit silly, but the Barber’s Paradox is actually a simplified version of Russell’s Paradox involving sets that are members of themselves, which had baffled mathematicians and logicians for decades. Clearly, for a logical system to be valid and verifiable, statements need to be provably true or false. 2+2 for example, needs to always equal four. Yet the paradox exposed a hole that no one seemed able to close.

Eventually, the situation came to a head when David Hilbert, one of the most prominent logical positivists, proposed a program that rested on three pillars. First, mathematics needed to be shown to be complete in that it worked for all statements. Second, mathematics needed to be shown to be consistent, no contradictions or paradoxes allowed. Finally, all statements need to be computable, meaning they yielded a clear answer.

The hope was that the foundational crisis would be resolved, the hole at the center of logic could be closed and the logical positivists could move along with their project.

The System Crashes

Hilbert and his colleagues received and answer faster than most had expected. In 1931, just 11 years after Hilbert proposed his foundational problems, 25-year-old Kurt Gödel published his incompleteness theorems. It wasn’t the answer anyone was expecting. Gödel showed that any logical system could be either complete or consistent, but not both,

Put more simply, Gödel proved that every logical system will always crash. It’s only a matter of time. Logic would remain broken forever and the positivists hopes were dashed. Obviously, you can’t engineer a society based on a logical system that itself is hopelessly flawed. For better or for worse, the world would remain a messy place.

Yet the implications of the downfall of logic turned out to be far different, and far more strange, than anyone had expected. In 1937, building on Gödel’s proof, Alan Turing published his own paper on Hilbert’s computability problem. Much like the Austrian, he found that all problems are not computable, but with a silver lining. As part of his proof, he included a description of a simple machine that could compute every computable number.

Ironically, Turing’s machine would usher in a new era of digital computing. These machines, constructed on the basis that they would all eventually crash, have proven to be incredibly useful, as long as we accept them for what they are — flawed machines. As it turns out, to solve big, important problems, we often need to discard up our illusions first.

We Need to Think Less Like Engineers and More Like Gardeners

The 20th century ushered in a new era of science. We conquered infectious diseases, explored space and unlocked the genetic code. So, it was not at all unreasonable to want to build on that success by applying an engineering mindset to other fields of human endeavor. However, at this point, it should be clear that the approach is far past the point of saving.

It would be nice if the general well-being could be reduced to a single metric like GDP or the success of an enterprise could be fully encapsulated in a stock price. Yet today we live, as Danny Hillis has put it, in an age of the entanglement, where even a limited set of variables can lead to the emergence of a new and unexpected order.

We need to take a more biological view in which we think less like engineers and more like gardeners that grow and nurture ecosystems. The logical positivists had no idea what they were growing, but somehow what emerged from the soil they tilled turned out to be far more wondrous—not to mention exponentially more useful—than what they had originally intended.

As I wrote at the beginning of this crazy year, the time has come to rediscover our humanity. We are, in so many ways, at a crossroads. Technology will not save us. Markets will not save us. We simply need to make better choices.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credit: Pixabay

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Why Revolutions Fail

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Why Revolutions Fail

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

I still remember the feeling of triumph I felt in the winter of 2005, in the aftermath of the Orange Revolution in Ukraine. During the fall, we readied ourselves for what proved to be a falsified election. In November, when the fraudulent results were announced, we took to the streets and the demonstrations lasted until new elections were called in January.

We had won, or so we thought. Our preferred candidate was elected and it seemed like a new era had dawned. Yet soon it became clear that things were not going well. Planned reforms stalled in a morass of corruption and incompetence. In 2010, Victor Yanukovych, the same man we marched against, rose to the presidency.

The pattern repeats with almost metronomic regularity. Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak was ousted in the Arab Spring, only to be replaced by the equally authoritarian Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. George W. Bush gave way to Barack Obama, who set the stage for Donald Trump. Revolutions sow the seeds for their own demise. We need to learn to break the cycle.

The Physics Of Change And The Power Of Shared Values

In Rules for Radicals, the legendary activist Saul Alinsky observed that every revolution inspires a counterrevolution. That is the physics of change. Every action provokes a reaction because, if an idea is important, it threatens the status quo, which never yields its power gracefully. If you seek to make change in the world, you can be sure that some people aren’t going to like it and will fight against it.

For example, President Bush’s support for a “Defense of Marriage Act” inspired then San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom to unilaterally begin performing weddings for gay and lesbian couples at City Hall, in what was termed the Winter of Love. 4,027 couples were married before their nuptials were annulled by the California Supreme Court a month later.

The backlash was fierce. Conservative groups swung into action to defend the “sanctity of marriage” and in 2008 were successful in placing Proposition 8, an amendment to the California Constitution that prohibited gay marriage, on the ballot. It was passed with a narrow majority of 52% of the electorate which, only further galvanized LGBTQ activists and led, eventually, to legalized gay marriage.

In our work helping organizations drive transformation, we find similar dynamics at play. Corporate revolutionaries tend to assume that once they get their budget approved or receive executive sponsorship, everything will go smoothly. The reality is that’s the point when things often get bogged down, because those who oppose change see that it has actually become possible and redouble their efforts to undermine it.

The Differentiation Trap

Many revolutionaries, corporate and otherwise, are frustrated marketers. They want to differentiate themselves in the marketplace of ideas through catchy slogans that “cut through.” It is by emphasizing difference that they seek to gin up enthusiasm among their most loyal supporters.

That was certainly true of LGBTQ activists, who marched through city streets shouting slogans like “We’re here, we’re queer and we’d like to say hello.” They led a different lifestyle and wanted to demand that their dignity be recognized. More recently, Black Lives Matter activists made calls to “defund the police,” which many found to be shocking and anarchistic.

Corporate change agents tend to fall into a similar trap. They rant on about “radical” innovation and “disruption,” ignoring the fact that few like to be radicalized or disrupted. Proponents of agile development methods often tout their manifesto, ignoring the fact many outside the agile community find the whole thing a bit weird and unsettling.

While emphasizing difference may excite people who are already on board, it is through shared values that you bring people in. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that the fight for LGBTQ rights began to gain traction when activists started focusing on family values. Innovation doesn’t succeed because it’s “radical,” but when it solves a meaningful problem. The value of Agile methods isn’t a manifesto, but the fact that they can improve performance.

Learning To Love Your Haters

Once you understand that shared values are key to driving change forward, it becomes clear that those who oppose the change you seek can help break the cycle of revolution and counter-revolution and beginning to drive change forward. That’s why you need to learn to love your haters.

By listening to people who hate your idea you can identify early flaws and fix them before it’s too late. Yet even more importantly they can help you identify shared values because they are trying to persuade many of the same people you are. Often, if not always, you can use their own arguments against them.

That’s exactly what happened in the fight for LGBTQ rights. The central argument against the movement was that the gay lifestyle was a threat to family values. So it was no accident that it prevailed on the basis of living in committed relationships and raising happy families. In a similar way, Black Lives Matter activists would do much better focusing on the shared value of safe neighborhoods that in a crusade against police officers.

To be clear, listening to your opposition doesn’t mean engaging directly with them. That’s a mistake Barack Obama made far too often. He would appear on Bill O’Reilly’s show on Fox News, only to be ridiculed as soon as he was off camera. He would have been much better off watching at home and using the bombastic TV host’s remarks for his own purposes.

Achieving Schwerpunkt

In the final analysis, the reason that most would-be revolutionaries fail is that they assume that the righteousness of their cause will save them. It will not. Injustice, inequity and ineffectiveness can thrive for decades and even centuries, far longer than a human lifespan. If you think that your idea will prevail simply because you believe in it you will be sorely disappointed.

Tough, important battles can only be won with good tactics, which is why successful change agents learn how to adopt the principle of Schwerpunkt. The idea is that instead of trying to defeat your enemy with overwhelming force generally, you want to deliver overwhelming force and win a decisive victory at a particular point of attack.

Thurgood Marshall did not seek to integrate all schools, at least not at first. He started with graduate schools, where the “separate but equal” argument was most vulnerable. More recently, Stop Hate For Profit attacked Facebook not by asking users to boycott, but focused on advertisers, who themselves were vulnerable to activist action.

Yet Schwerpunkt is a dynamic, not a static concept. You have to constantly innovate your approach as your opposition adapts to whatever success you may achieve. For example, the civil rights movement had its first successes with boycotts, but eventually moved on to sit-ins, “Freedom Rides,” community actions and eventually, mass marches.

The key to success wasn’t any particular tactic, leader or slogan but strategic flexibility. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what most movements lack. All too often they get caught up in a strategy and double down, because it feels good to believe in something, even if it’s a failure. They would rather make a point than make a real difference.

Successful revolutionaries, on the other hand, understand that power will not fall simply because you oppose it, but it will crumble if you bring those who support it over to your side. That’s why lasting change is always built on the common ground of shared values.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credit: Pixabay

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Technology Was Supposed to Solve Our Problems, Instead, They Got Worse

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Technology Was Supposed to Solve Our Problems, Instead, They Got Worse

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

Techno-optimism may have reached its zenith in 2011, when Marc Andreessen declared that software was eating the world. Back then, it seemed that anything rooted in the physical world was doomed to decline while geeky engineers banging out endless lines of code would own the future and everything in it.

Yet as Derek Thompson pointed out in The Atlantic, the euphoria of Andreessen and his Silicon Valley brethren seems to have been misplaced. A rash of former unicorns have seen their value plummet, while WeWork saw its IPO self-destruct. Today, even Internet giants like Amazon seem to be investing more in atoms than they do in bits.

We were promised a new economy of increasing returns, but statistics show a very different story. Over the past 30 years wages have stagnated while productivity growth has slowed to a crawl. At the same time, costs for things like education and healthcare have skyrocketed. What is perhaps most disturbing is how many of our most basic problems have gotten worse.

1. Extreme Inequality

The digital revolution was supposed to be a democratizing force, increasing access to information and competition while breaking the institutional monopoly on power. Yet just the opposite seems to have happened, with a relatively small global elite grabbing more money and more influence.

Consider market consolidation. An analysis published in the Harvard Business Review showed that from airlines to hospitals to beer, market share is increasingly concentrated in just a handful of firms. A more expansive study of 900 industries conducted by The Economist found that two thirds have become more dominated by larger players. In fact, almost everywhere you look markets are weakening.

Perhaps not surprisingly, we see the same trends in households as we do with businesses. The OECD reports that income inequality is at its highest level in over 50 years. Even in emerging markets, where millions have been lifted out of poverty, most of the benefits have gone to a small few.

While inequality may seem abstract, the consequences of it are concrete and stark. Social mobility has been declining in America for decades, transforming the “land of opportunity” into what is increasingly a caste system. The stresses to our societies have also contributed to a global rise in authoritarian populism.

2. Hunger

Since the 1950s, the Green Revolution has transformed agriculture around the world, dramatically reducing hunger in places like Asia, Africa and South America. More recently, advances in gene editing promise what may be an even greater increase in productivity that has the potential to outpace projected population growth.

The impact of the increase in agricultural productivity cannot be overstated. In fact, studies have shown that as hunger subsides, economic activity increases while both mortality and fertility decrease. When people don’t have to struggle to take care of basic needs, their ambition and creativity can be unleashed.

The story in the United States, however, is starkly different. Research by the USDA finds that 11.1% of US households are food insecure. Another study revealed that about half of students on college campuses experience food insecurity. If that sounds bad, a study by Brookings suggests that the problem has gotten far worse during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The truth is that these days hunger is much more of a policy problem than it is an economic problem. Science and technology have made it possible to produce more than enough food to feed everyone on the planet, even in desperately poor countries. The reason that people go hungry on America’s streets is simply because we let it happen.

3. Falling life expectancy

Around the same time as the Green Revolution was beginning to alleviate hunger in developing countries, we entered a golden age of antibiotics. After penicillin became commercially available in 1945 the floodgates opened and scientists uncovered dozens of compounds that could fight infection. Millions of lives were saved.

Starting in the 1970s, we started to make serious headway in heart disease, leading to a miraculous decline in death from heart attacks and strokes. At the same time, due to advances in cancer treatment such as targeted therapies and immunotherapy cancer survivability has soared. In fact, medical science had advanced so much that some serious people believe that immortality is within reach.

Yet in America, things are going the other way. Life expectancy has been declining for years, largely due to “deaths of despair” due to drugs, alcohol and suicide. Anxiety and depression are rising to epidemic levels. Healthcare costs continue to explode while the number of uninsured continues to rise. If history is any guide, we can only expect these trends to continue.

So although technology has made it possible for us to live longer, healthier lives, we find ourselves living shorter, more miserable lives.

Revealing and Building Anew

In a 1954 essay, The Question Concerning Technology the German philosopher Martin Heidegger described technology as akin to art, in that it reveals truths about the nature of the world, brings them forth and puts them to some specific use. In the process, human nature and its capacity for good and evil is also revealed.

He gives the example of a hydroelectric dam, which reveals the energy of a river and puts it to use making electricity. In much the same sense, scientists don’t “create,” miracle cures as much as they uncover truths about human biology and leverage that knowledge to improve health. It’s a subtle, but very important distinction.

Yet in another essay, Building Dwelling Thinking, he explains that building also plays an important role, because to build for the world, we first must understand what it means to live in it. The revealing power of technology forces us to rethink old truths and reimagine new societal norms. That, more than anything else, is where the challenges lie. Miracle cures, for example, do little for those without health insurance.

We are now nearing the end of the digital age and entering a new era of innovation which will likely be more impactful than anything we’ve seen since the rise of electricity and internal combustion a century ago. This, in turn, will initiate a new cycle of revealing and building that will be as challenging as anything humanity has ever faced.

Prognosticators and futurists try to predict what will happen through some combination of extrapolation and supposition, but the truth is the future will most be shaped by the choices we make. We could have chosen to make our society more equal, healthier and happier, but did not. We can, of course, choose differently. The future will be revealed in what we choose to build.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credit: Pixabay

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Learning from the Failure of Quibi

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Learning from the Failure of Quibi

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

In 2018, Steve Blank wrote a piece in Harvard Business Review questioning the viability of the “lean startup” model. Given that Steve had pioneered lean startup techniques, I was intrigued. Why would he, all of a sudden begin, to doubt an idea that had been so successful and, to me at least, still seemed so relevant, even for large enterprises.

As it turned out, what made Steve hesitate was a new venture called “New TV” that was headed up by the dream team of legendary Hollywood producer Jeffrey Katzenberg and star Silicon Valley CEO Meg Whitman. Beyond talent and cache, it had raised almost $2 billion. With that much money, how could it lose?

Now we know. The venture, which eventually came to be known as “Quibi,” recently announced it was shutting down, less than seven months after its product launch. It’s become an all too familiar tale. Multi-billion-dollar washouts, including WeWork, Better Place and others, have become all too common. We need to learn from their mistakes.

You Can Have Too Much Money

At the heart of Steve Blank’s argument against his own idea was that The Lean Startup “was an answer to a specific problem,” namely that startup companies face a limited runway due to scarce capital. In effect, he sees launching a new company as a race to identify a viable business model before you run out of money.

In Quibi’s case, however, there seemed to be unlimited capital. Its nearly $2 billion in funding would give it the ability to roll out a full-fledged business and, if things didn’t work as planned, still have the option to pivot. With access to that much money plus, presumably, ample access to even more, how could Katzenberg and Whitman go wrong?

To be honest, I never found the argument to be persuasive. I’ve launched countless businesses in my career and one thing I’ve learned is that you need to keep capital scarce in the early days. Limiting the amount of money you have around forces people to face up to problems and solve them. You can’t ignore warning signs when you’re close to broke.

Quibi, on the other hand, failed because it did ignore signals. With almost limitless programming budgets, producers knew they could sell Quibi their worst work. Infighting between Katzenberg and Whitman was ignored. Potential snafus, such as the inability for consumers to screenshot and share memes or to watch on TV screens, were overlooked.

Identify the Hair on Fire Use Case

Conventional marketing strategy dictates that you identify the largest addressable market for your product. That, after all, is where you can reach the most people, scale your business and earn the most money. So it made sense for Quibi to target Millennials in search of “quick bites” to watch while on line at Starbucks.

Yet when you’re launching something new and different, you don’t want the largest addressable market which, almost by definition, already has a lot of companies serving it. Instead, you want to identify a hair-on-fire use case—a problem that somebody needs solved so badly that they almost literally have their hair on fire. That’s where you’ll find customers to put up with the inevitable bugs and glitches that always come up.

For example, with Tesla, Elon Musk didn’t target the largest addressable market—a mid-market family model—but rather Silicon Valley millionaires who liked the idea of a high performance, eco-friendly car. Those customers weren’t price sensitive and didn’t need to depend on the car to pick the kids up at soccer practice, but did give the company a foothold in the luxury market. The mass market product, the Model 3, would come years later.

I’m sure there is a “hair-on-fire” use case for a short form video platform. Unfortunately, these things are never obvious, if they were, they would already be large addressable markets. Presumably, Katzenberg and Whitman considered themselves to be so smart that they could get it right on the first try.

Train The Monkey First

At Google’s X division, the company’s “moonshot factory,” the mantra is #MonkeyFirst. The idea is that if you want to get a monkey to recite Shakespeare on a pedestal, it’s best to start by training the monkey, not building the pedestal, because training the monkey is the hard part. Anyone can build a pedestal.

Returning to the example of Tesla and Elon much, in the case of electric cars, the “monkey” was always making a battery powerful enough to achieve an acceptable range. In the early years, that’s what the company focused on and, with an affluent customer base, they could do so without worrying too much about costs.

Once Tesla had customers, it could begin to focus on learning from them and adapting to what they wanted from an electric car. At the same time, it was able to develop manufacturing and operational capability that allowed it to scale. All of this went very slowly at first, but then accelerated at a pace that took incumbent car companies by surprise.

In the media business, the “monkey” is always to build an audience. Yet Katzenberg and Whitman chose to plow money into content, assuming that they knew what their (at that point nonexistent) audience wanted. Essentially, they blew through all of their money building the pedestal and assumed the monkey would train itself.

Your Strategy Is Always Wrong

In their letter announcing the closure of Quibi, the founders wrote, “And yet, Quibi is not succeeding. Likely for one of two reasons: because the idea itself wasn’t strong enough to justify a standalone streaming service or because of our timing… Unfortunately, we will never know but we suspect it’s been a combination of the two.”

Yet the point isn’t that Quibi got it’s strategy wrong or that the pandemic altered its chances of success, but rather that your strategy is always wrong. Everybody gets disrupted sooner or later and every business model eventually fails. The art of managing a venture isn’t to execute the “right” strategy, but to make the strategy less wrong over time.

Katzenberg and Whitman, it seems, allowed their previous success to blind them. They appear to have simply assumed that they were so smart that they could get it all right out of the gate. They didn’t allow room for error, to make mistakes or to pivot. When things didn’t go as planned, there was nowhere else to go. They had to pack it in.

Probably the most important thing we can learn from Quibi’s failure is to not believe your own PR. Plan for and prepare things to go wrong. Nobody really knows anything until it can be observed in the real world. Or, as Steve Blank might put it, no business plan ever survives first contact with a customer.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credit: Unsplash

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The Need for a Dignity Economy

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The Need for a Dignity Economy

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

Every era has its own ideology that creates assumptions and drives actions. At the turn of the century, titans like J.P. Morgan believed that monopolized industries provided stability against the disruptive influence of competition. More recently, the end of the Cold War was supposed to usher in a new era of capitalism and democracy.

It didn’t work out that way. Instead we got oligarchy, authoritarian populism and we lost trust in the institutions that used to govern our society. In America, even competitive capitalism has been greatly weakened. We believed that we could leave everything up to market and technological forces, but they failed us.

Today, we are in the midst of a set of profound generational shifts that will rapidly transform our society over the next decade. As we have throughout history, we will need to own up to our past mistakes and chart a new course. That will mean focusing less on technocratic solutions and more on building a culture rooted in basic dignity and respect.

The Rise Of Merit

In 1940, James Conant, the President of Harvard, gave a talk at the University of California that was soon republished in The Atlantic magazine. Entitled, “Education for a Classless Society,” it advocated for the idea of social mobility based on merit, rather than privilege being handed down through inheritance.

To support this ambition, Conant championed the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) to help identify talented students for scholarships to Harvard. His hope, largely realized, was that other schools would follow suit and education in America would become a sorting mechanism, choosing men (at the time, it was largely white men) to receive advanced professional training.

Today, we have so thoroughly internalized Conant’s ideal that it’s hard to imagine that things could ever have been any different. College has largely become a prerequisite to a successful career and getting more kids to go to college is a top priority. The federal government spends about $80 billion on higher education programs, but less than $2 billion for vocational training.

As Michael Sandel points out in The Tyranny of Merit, this sorting system has had an insidious effect on our culture. Those who are deemed worthy get all the benefits that society has to offer. Those that are not, are not only left behind, but are seen as “takers” rather than “makers” and therefore undeserving of even basic things like access to health and child care.

Applying An Engineering Mindset

Once you accept the premise of meritocracy, the next logical step would be to optimize for meritocratic traits. We could, following the path James Conant established, develop a series of standardized tests to identify and reward our best students. And why stop there? Why not rate our teachers by their ability to produce students who get the best scores.

We can then extend that approach to all spheres of society. How should we best evaluate and manage the performance of an enterprise? Focus on shareholder value. How are we progressing as a society? Simply look at the GDP and job growth numbers and you should have a pretty good idea. What about countries that are falling behind? Well, just develop a standard reform package and then paint by numbers!

Eventually a clear doctrine emerged: A technocratic elite identifies a minimal number of key performance indicators and then, applying rigorous analytical techniques, devises a strategy to optimize based on those metrics. As the technocrats learn, they begin to build systems to increase efficiency and, eventually, those systems become encoded in algorithms.

This engineering mindset has prevailed for more than a generation and it has failed us. Except for a small slice of society, we’ve become poorer, sicker and more vulnerable. Our markets have weakened. We pay more and get less. We’re not only less happy, anxiety and depression have risen to epidemic levels.

Yet perhaps the most insidious effect of meritocracy and the engineering mindset is how we treat each other. If we believe that we have been anointed, through our talent and effort, for better things, we feel emboldened to consider our fellow citizens as something less than ourselves, which breeds not only inequality, but resentment and mistrust.

Holding Ourselves Accountable

In just one month in 1989, the world saw both the fall of the Berlin Wall and the emergence of the World Wide Web, both of which unleashed enormous enthusiasm and opportunity. We thought we were entering a new era in which democracy, free markets and technology would bring about a better world. We were wrong.

It wasn’t all a mirage. There were genuine accomplishments. I lived in post-communist countries in Eastern Europe for 15 years and the progress made was truly amazing. Miracle cures like cancer immunotherapy have saved millions of lives. The Internet has made it possible for an ordinary teenager today to have better access to information than a professional researcher at a major institution did a generation ago. Those are all great things.

Yet we are, in so many ways, worse off than we were 30 years ago. Productivity growth has been depressed, except for a short uptick from 1996-2004. Despite medical breakthroughs, life expectancy in the US has been declining. Markets are less free and less competitive. Poland and Hungary, previous models of democratic reform, have backslid. Even social mobility in the US, the entire aim or the meritocratic project, has been significantly diminished.

It’s time to hold ourselves accountable and chart a new course. Organizations are more than simple units of production. They are workplaces and members of communities. People are far more than economic inputs that can be reduced to resumes and statistics, but human beings worthy of dignity and respect.

People as Ends in Themselves

One of the things I learned managing companies is how much more effective you can be if you assume that everybody wants to do a good job. It makes it possible to waste less time engineering incentives or enforcing rules and focus more on helping everybody actualize their potential. When you encounter the occasional bad apple, it’s not hard to fire them.

In much the same way, we need to learn to focus less on quantifiable signs of merit and more on dignity by treating people as ends in themselves rather than means to an end. Once you do that, it becomes obvious that everybody needs access to health care, that every child should be educated and that everybody deserves to feel safe in their community and in their home.

After all, who says that an anesthesiologist is more worthy than a hospice worker. Or that someone who makes a million dollars a year selling enterprise software makes a greater contribution to society than someone who works in a grocery store during a pandemic. Remuneration simply cannot be the only measure of value.

In the final analysis, ideology should serve people, not the other way around. The success of a society needs to be measured by the well-being of those who live in it. If we increase GDP, but our air and water are more polluted, our children less educated, we live unhappy lives and die deaths of despair, what have we really gained?

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credit: Pixabay

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Ten Transformational Change Principles

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Ten Transformational Change Principles

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

It’s been clear to me for some time that 2020 would be a pivotal year. Globalization and digitalization, the two major forces of the last generation, have disappointed. The corporate mantra of shareholder value has proven to be bankrupt. The end of the Cold War has led not to a democratic utopia, but a rise in populist authoritarianism.

Much of what we believed turned out to not be true. At the same time, there is great cause for optimism. We are undergoing profound shifts in technology, resources, migration and demographics that will give us the opportunity to drive enormous transformation over the next decade. We are likely entering a new era of innovation.

We need to learn from history. Positive change never happens by itself. We can’t just assume that we can just set up some basic “rules of the road” and technological and market forces will do the rest for us. Any significant change always inspires fierce resistance and we need to overcome that resistance to bring change about. Here are 10 principles that can guide us:

Revolutions don’t begin with a slogan. They begin with a cause. The vision always needs to be rooted in solving problems people genuinely care about. That’s why you can’t bribe or coerce change. Once you start trying to engineer change through incentives, you are signaling that this is a change that people don’t really want to make.

Transformation fails because people oppose it, not because people don’t understand it. For any significant change, there are going to be some people who aren’t going to like it and they are going to undermine it in ways that are dishonest, underhanded, and deceptive. That is your primary design constraint. Change of any kind threatens the status quo, which never yields its power gracefully.

To be effective, change efforts need to be rooted in values. Values represent constraints and constraints bring meaning and credibility. A movement without values is nothing more than a mob.

Resist the urge to engage those who attack and undermine you. In fact, as a general rule, you should avoid them until you have gained significant momentum.

Focus on building local majorities. You want to be continually expanding your majorities within communities and clusters. When you go outside your majority, however, you get pushback. Stay on the inside pushing out.

Shift from differentiating values to shared values. Differentiating values are what make people passionate about an idea, but shared values create entry points for people to join your cause. You overcome your opposition by listening and identifying shared values in what they say that can be leveraged to attract others to your cause.

You design effective tactics by mobilizing people to influence institutions. Every action has a purpose. You are always mobilizing someone to influence something. For everything you do, you ask who are we mobilizing and to influence what?

Scale change and weave the network through cooptable resources. Instead of trying to get people to do what you want, find people who want what you want and give them tools to help them take action. It is through taking action, not taking orders, that people take ownership of the movement and make it their own.

Survive Victory. The victory phase is the most dangerous phase. You need to think about how to “survive victory” from the start. It’s not enough to make a point, you have to want to make a difference.

Transformation is always a journey, never a particular destination. The most important thing you can do to bring change about is simply to get started. If not now, when? If not you, who?

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credit: Pixabay

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