Since the start of the crisis I’ve been regularly updating my LinkedIn feed with relevant insights about how this is unfolding. I’ve found a high level of engagement with this format rather than Twitter or indeed on this blog, so if you’d like to learn more about my thinking, please check my LinkedIn feed regularly.
Stay safe.
From the BBC comes this highly relevant article about the challenges of modern democracy. It highlights several flaws with the nature of Western governance and then highlights the key issue:
The time has come to face an inconvenient reality: that modern democracy – especially in wealthy countries – has enabled us to colonise the future. We treat the future like a distant colonial outpost devoid of people, where we can freely dump ecological degradation, technological risk, nuclear waste and public debt, and that we feel at liberty to plunder as we please.
The whole piece is worth reading.
In this interview with Shane Parrish, the leadership expert Jennifer Garvey-Berger addresses the connections between four areas that many governance teams fail to grasp: complexity, leadership, scanning, and experimentation.
About fifty minutes into the interview she notes:
“In complexity we want to play really close attention to what’s going on right now in the system, because right now in this moment is where the seeds of whatever is going to happen next live…
Leaders that I think are really outstanding leaders – those leaders are able to pay attention to this system in such a way that they can hear whispers of things – the whispers of things today are really important to pay attention to.
So in complexity you’re trying to find out how can I get a good sense of what’s going on right now, and then figure out which of those things I want to amplify and which of those things I want less of, I want to dampen down and move the system away from altogether.
Because you can’t know exactly what’s going to happen next, you devise a series of what (Dave) Snowden calls Safe to Fail experiments. These are experiments that you don’t know what’s going to happen, but they will help you learn.”
I’m often asked what my job title is, and my standard reply is that I don’t have one. If pushed however I use the term ‘serendipity architect.’ Mentioning this phrase is usually a good indicator of the mindset of the person I’m talking to – if they’re open and want to know what the title means, I’m more likely to enjoy working with them.
Some people are dismissive of the term. In my experience those people are likely to be highly operational, and not the type of people that cope well with the inherent ambiguity of long term thinking and the connections to strategy and innovation.
The power of serendipity is acknowledged occasionally in the mainstream business media, like this recent example in McKinsey online:
Serendipity involves stumbling over something unusual, and then having the foresight or perspective to capitalize on it. What makes that such an attractive story? It’s the juxtaposition of seemingly independent things. In a serendipitous flash, one recent winner, an engineering firm, realized that the gear it designed for scallop trawlers could also be used to recover hard-to-get-at material in nuclear-waste pools. Surprising connections such as these set off a chain of events that culminate in a commercial opportunity. So to build this story line, think about the quirky combination of ideas that got you started and remember that serendipity is not the same as chance—you were wise enough, when something surprising happened, to see its potential.
By the way, the entire article is a good read…
The Vice Chairman of Korn Ferry and a McKinsey partner have published a short book that has studied the benefits of long term thinking. There’s an interview with the authors on the Wharton site that gives some context and one extract from this stands out:
Just beware of the trends going on in the world. Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock, which manages $6 trillion in assets, says that it would be key for CEOs to realize some of the changes going on in society. For example, [consider] this shift towards automation and artificial intelligence. A McKinsey study we cite in the book says that [those technologies] could displace 30% of American workers.
CEOs who want to survive in the long run, and want their companies to survive in the long run, have to be aware of what’s going on in society, and try to steer their companies to address some of these issues. If they do that, they’ll get the support of their investors, customers and employees.
As most of my updates now go to my clients rather than here on my blog, this post may seem out of place compared to previous writings. However I’ve become increasingly concerned about the failure of governments to understand the implications of the:
There are significantly more risks to consider in the years ahead, and these have severe implications for stability. Bain and Company has completed some good work on this recently, and a summary has just appeared on the HBR site. I don’t usually include large quotes here, but this piece of work is a concise summary that is hard to beat (the highlights are mine):
The benefits of automation, by contrast, will flow to about 20% of workers—primarily highly compensated, highly skilled workers—as well as to the owners of capital. The growing scarcity of highly-skilled workers may push their incomes even higher relative to less-skilled workers. As a result, automation has the potential to significantly increase income inequality.
The speed of change matters. A large transformation that unfolds at a slower pace allows economies the time to adjust and grow to reabsorb unemployed workers back into the labor force. However, our analysis shows that the automation of the U.S. service sector could eliminate jobs two to three times more rapidly than in previous periods of labor transformation in modern history.
Of course, the clear pattern of history is that creating more value with fewer resources has led to rising material wealth and prosperity for centuries. We see no reason to believe that this time will be different—eventually. But the time horizon for our analysis stretches only into the early 2030s. If the automation investment boom turns to bust in that time frame, as we expect, many societies will develop severe imbalances.
The coming decade will test leadership teams profoundly. There is no set formula for managing through significant economic upheaval, but companies can take many practical steps to assess how a vastly changed landscape might affect their business. Resilient organizations that can absorb shocks and change course quickly will have the best chance of thriving in the turbulent 2020s and beyond.
The full report from Bain is also well worth reading, and is available here.
A university study in Italy has simulated the effect of luck on wealth creation. The study showed that richer people were more likely to be also lucky. While this study was focused on individuals, it also looked at the wider implications, and concluded that casting wider for insights will provide better returns than placing specific bets.
If this research is able to be reproduced, it would give further support to the idea that expanding an organisation’s field of view will create long term returns.
There’s a long history of ‘corporate antibodies’ blocking innovation. The challenge stems from the issue of KPIs vs innovation. Most organisations have a well tuned engine room that produces profit. It’s specifically tuned to eliminate variation and maximise efficiency. These two goals don’t fit well with innovation which can be messy, iterative and inefficient. In this blog post, Steve Blank offers a cunning plan to work around the anti-bodies in a manner that both enables innovation and builds capability. The essence of the idea is that organisations need a set of processes for the engine room, and another set for innovation.
In his post Steve even offers templates for how a leadership team should manage implementing this process, which is something that is increasingly rare to find online (where it’s easy to be a innovation expert on theory, but much harder to prove real-world credentials).
It’s a highly recommended read if you’re in a large organisation, and banging your head against the wall trying to move the dial on innovation.
After watching the sci-fi movie ‘Passengers,’ I became intrigued with the business models that support the plot of movies like this. In turn, this triggered a Guest Blog post with Scientific American, which you can read here.
Ten years ago a small group of us started down the path of a large-scale transformation at the Canterbury DHB. Now this work has been hailed in The Guardian as something that the NHS should follow. Read the full details here .
