“Network thinking lets us scientifically understand the world around us as one of connections that shape observed phenomena, rather than as one where the intrinsic properties of people, genes, or particles determine outcomes. Like previous scientific revolutions, the network revolution also has the promise of reshaping our basic commonsense expectations of the world around us, and may allow us to recognize that we are not a basically individualistic, asocial, and quarrelsome creature that comes in bounded linguistic, ethnic, racial, or religious types, but a social species linked to one another by far-reaching network ties.” – How Networks Are Revolutionizing Scientific (and Maybe Human) Thought – Scientific American
on the net without a net
I have spent the past 20 years figuring out what changes the internet era might bring. During the last 12 years I’ve run a web-powered business. What have I learned as a freelancer on the Net? First of all I am lucky that blogging gave me an international reputation, and that I started early enough. But all the benefits from blogging have been indirect. It is impossible to proactively increase sales through this model. Word of mouth travels at its own speed and in unknown directions. All things come in time: usually a long time.
I have found that business value keeps shifting. I used to get paid well to help companies select new learning technologies. I have not done that type of work for over five years. I have also seen organizations move away from using external consultants. I think the entire consulting model is ripe for disruptive change. When LinkedIn advertises ex-McKinsey consultants available for $60 per hour, you know that it’s an obsolete business model.
walking to extinction
Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.
“The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.” – Henry David Thoreau – via @dennisdenktmee
@hvaelama – “get all of humanity to educate itself swiftly enough to generate spontaneous social behaviors that will avoid extinction.”
@monkchips – “holacracy is Greek for bullshit, right?”
best finds of 2015
Every second Friday I review what I’ve noted on social media and post a wrap-up of what caught my eye. I do this as a reflective thinking process and to put what I’ve learned on a platform I control: this blog. Here are what I consider the best of Friday’s Finds for 2015.
Quotes
“All things are subject to interpretation. Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.” – Friedrich Nietzsche – via @surreallyno
@ericgarland – “Humility is often painful, but arrogance is always fatal.”
@willrich45 – Engagement: “Not a metric for learning. A prerequisite.”
“I think it’s a discovery all artists make: the most interesting and bravest work is likely the hardest to make a living from.” – @berkun
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it” — Upton Sinclair – via @jerrymichalski
learning in the network era
This week I am reviewing my posts from 2015 and putting some of the core ideas together. Here are some thoughts on personal and social learning in the network era.
Training, and education, are often solutions looking for a problem. But good training and education can have a huge impact on behaviour and performance. Remember that great teacher who inspired you? Did you ever have a coach who got you to a higher level of performance? But throwing content at someone and hoping for learning to happen is not a good strategy. This is how far too many courses are designed and delivered.
platform capitalism and the post-job economy
Here are some collected thoughts on the changing nature of work and shifting wealth creation.
Platform capitalism is beginning to define the economy for the second Gilded Age we seem to be entering. It requires 4 contributing factors, which when combined, create a perfect opportunity for the ‘uberization’ of almost any industry.
- A platform: a mobile application delivered through an oligopoly like iTunes or Google Play.
- A critical mass of users: upwardly mobile knowledge workers, especially those in Silicon Valley or the tech sector.
- Desperate service providers: people with no ability to organize due to weak or non-existing trade unions in their field, who see opportunities for better cash flow.
- Lack of regulations and oversight: bureaucracies that either cannot keep up with technology advances, or political leadership that condones poor working conditions in the name of progress.
beyond the reach of automation
This week I am reviewing my posts from 2015 and putting some of the core ideas together. Here are some thoughts on how the increasing automation of knowledge work can be addressed by a new approach to organizational leadership.
Any work that is routine will be automated. Jobs that only do routine work will disappear. Valued work, enhanced by our increased connectivity, will be based more on creativity than intelligence. The future of human work will require tacit knowledge and informal learning, and will create intangible value that cannot easily be turned into commodities. The future of work will be complex and this will be even more obvious in the next five years, as robots and software keep doing more complicated work. Just as people had to become literate to work in the 20th century workplace, now they will have to be creative, empathetic, and human: doing what machines cannot do.
More: preparing-for-2020
automation is coming to a job near you
Just as farmhands were replaced by machines 100 years ago, so too will knowledge workers be replaced by networked computers in the next few decades. Last century, those farmhands had the option of moving to the city and working in factories, but what are the alternatives for today’s knowledge workers? It is not likely to be a new job, as the job itself is being made obsolete, underlined by 54 million freelancers in the USA today, accounting for almost 1/4 of working-age adults.
writing, communicating, learning
Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.
“Mastery is not referred to the use of any tool. It is a state of the person. And then it permeates the use of *any* tool.” – Stelio Verzera
How You Record Ideas May Impact Creativity, via @madelynblair
“As one of our architect users put it in an interview we conducted recently on the value of drawing in the digital age, “When you build a lot of buildings, and you go and visit them, you always think back on that first sketch. Those first few sketches are where the big idea came through.” We found over and over that the act of using sketching as “conversational as opposed to representational,” in the words of another architect, was the key to discovery—when the act of drawing is a means to an end, not the end in and of itself. Through sketching, you locate the idea. Uninhibited sketching is Beethoven’s long walk.”
intangible value
I have learned a lot from Verna Allee over the years, and frequently referred to her work on this blog. Now that Verna has retired her websites, I have collected some of her insights together in one place. It was her work on value network analysis [PDF] that particularly influenced my thinking.
“Only through the power of value networks can we address our complex issues – together – and create a more hopeful future.” —Verna Allee