Gratitude for Spiritset

In my last blog post, I explored the need to expand beyond our current focus on mindset and to appreciate the role that heartset plays in shaping our beliefs, choices and actions. In reflecting on this framing, I’ve come to realize I left out a third element that provides a foundation and context for both mindset and heartset – it’s our spiritset.

What’s that? Well, it’s a made-up word, but I’m looking for symmetry with the word that dominates most of our discussions today – mindset. I’ve already made up the word heartset, so why not keep on going and offer you spiritset as well?

So, what’s spiritset? It’s my attempt to capture the essence of who we are and what ultimately makes us human. Deep within us, we each have a unique identity that struggles for expression and growth. It’s what ultimately defines us and our deepest needs. It shapes both our mindset and heartset.

Since it’s Thanksgiving today in the US, perhaps this is an appropriate time to express our gratitude for the foundation of everything that defines our humanity.

Spiritset is defined by a cascading series of paradoxes.

Individual yet connected

Our spiritset expresses our uniqueness. There’s never been anyone who is the same as we are. We all hunger for that uniqueness to be acknowledged and celebrated by others. At the same time, our spiritset defines how we are all connected to each other. No matter what our differences, we are all united by a spirit that craves connection and can only be fulfilled through connection. And it’s not just connection with other human beings. It’s connection with all other living things and even the earth and the universe. Even the introverts among us want to be connected and a prolonged feeling of isolation can lead to profound unhappiness. This paradox is nicely captured by the Latin expression “e pluribus unum” – out of many, one.

Evolving but stable                                                                                                                                                                     Our spiritset is not a fixed entity. It’s driven to grow and evolve. It wants to become more, much more. Yet, at the same time, it provides an anchor of stability that we can always count on. It defines elements that will never change and that we can hang onto in times of great stress and uncertainty. But it will never be satisfied with stability – we have a powerful need to flourish and achieve more and more of our potential

Risk-taking but protective                                                                                                                                                              In its quest to grow and evolve, our spiritset is not only willing, but eager, to take risks that will help us to achieve more of our potential. But, our spiritset is also very protective – its goal is to thrive but, in order to do that, it must first survive – so it will do everything it can to protect us from any dangers lurking in our environment. Its survival instinct is very strong and has helped us and our ancestors to navigate through some very challenging environments. It provides us with the courage to move forward, even in the most difficult times.

Giving but seeking to receive                                                                                                                                                      Our spiritset drives us to make a difference that matters to others who matter to us. We are deeply fulfilled by a sense that we have contributed something meaningful to others. Yet, at the same time, our spiritset is in a constant quest to find ways to receive from others so that we can achieve more of our own potential. The ultimate goal is a virtuous cycle where the more we receive from others, the more we are able to develop our potential and provide meaningful contributions to others.

Energizing but relaxing                                                                                                                                                               Our spiritset is an incredible source of energy. It inspires and drives us to explore and strive to achieve more of our potential. But at the same time our spiritset provides a source of calmness that relaxes and detaches us in the most trying of times. It’s that extraordinary balancing act that enables us to not only endure but to turn some of our biggest challenges into some of our greatest opportunities. And the amazing thing is that, when our spiritset truly connects with the spiritset of others, our energy is amplified and our relaxation deepens. Our spiritsets are an infinite source of energy when properly cultivated.

Where does spiritset come from?
Many of you who’ve been reading this far, have now concluded that I'm some kind of religious evangelist. After all, isn’t spiritset just another word for soul? Well, for some it is and that may be fine. But I caution you not to be too quick to use this word for several reasons.

First, depending on your religious persuasion, soul may have very different meanings and not capture all the dimensions of spiritset that I’m exploring.

Second, the concept of soul tends to be associated with religion and a belief in God. I’m not suggesting that we need to believe in God, at least as conventionally defined, in order to embrace the reality of our spiritset.

Perhaps our spiritset emerges from energy forces that we don’t yet fully understand, but that are a very real part of our universe. There’s so much of our universe that remains to be explored – perhaps this is just one other dimension inviting our attention. There are many who would describe themselves as spiritual, but not religious, who are exploring this dimension. I definitely fall into this camp.

But perhaps we don’t even have to believe in some mysterious energy force to embrace the concept of spiritset. Perhaps we just have to acknowledge that our physical bodies are extraordinarily complex and evolving systems that we are only beginning to understand. For a long time, we’ve pursued siloed understanding of our bodies, with some focusing on neuroscience, others focused on our cardiovascular systems and yet others focusing on our digestive systems. We’re only now beginning to understand that these are not independent systems but highly connected and interacting, and shaping each other in ways that we had not even imagined. Perhaps there are other dimensions of interaction and interdependence of our physical systems that give rise to the characteristics of the spiritset that I’m describing, without requiring us to look for some mysterious energy force or soul as the source of this spiritset.

Why does this matter?
Many of my business colleagues as they read this are now beginning to wonder if I’ve gone off the deep end and wandered into woo-woo land. Why does any of this matter for business or for the successful operation of any of our institutions?

Well, I believe it not only matters, but will become increasingly central to our individual, institutional and social survival. In more stable times, perhaps we could get away with embracing a rationalist outlook focused just on mindset, especially if we were willing to acknowledge that psychology could help us to understand the role that emotions and our heartset play in driving our choices and actions.

But, as we move deeper into the Big Shift, characterized by mounting performance pressure and an accelerating pace of change, we need to look deeper into ourselves to understand who we really are and what really motivates us. In that kind of world, superficial manipulation of our thoughts and emotions won’t produce the motivation we’ll all require to succeed.

The institutions and leaders who understand the power of our spiritset and the infinite potential that it offers will be the ones to survive and flourish in increasingly challenging times. They’re the ones who will help us to navigate from mounting performance pressure to expanding opportunity by cultivating that spiritset. They will see that spiritset, properly cultivated, provides us with the motivation that leads to accelerating performance improvement, while providing us with the guardrails to flourish rather than flounder. They will see that spiritsets, properly cultivated, can generate the mindsets and heartsets we need to achieve far more of our potential, as individuals and institutions. This isn’t just about our needs as individuals. It’s increasingly about our needs as institutions.

Cultivating spiritsets
Here’s the challenge. While we all have a spiritset that can enable us to flourish, our institutions and our societies have increasingly created environments that ignore, if not deny, the existence of that spiritset. We’re all focused on instilling the right knowledge and skills that can help us to succeed. We are taught that emotions are a distraction, if not deeply harmful, to our quest to succeed. Spiritset is viewed as some kind of mystical fantasy that undermines our ability to succeed in the material world. Success is increasingly defined as the accumulation of material goods.

Spiritsets are certainly not cultivated and nourished in our world driven by scalable efficiency. That doesn’t mean they go away. They live within each of us, struggling for recognition and attention. But they live in the recesses of our being and, for most of us, can only play a limited role in helping us to achieve more of our potential.

But, imagine what we could achieve if we not only acknowledged, but actively sought to cultivate, the spiritsets that reside within all of us. That would provide us with the motivation to achieve more of our potential and to have an increasing impact that matters on others. It would also provide us with an opportunity to connect more deeply with the spiritsets of others so that we could amplify our energy and achieve even more impact together.

By focusing on spiritsets, we would finally encourage everyone to find their passion and pursue their passion in ways that benefit others while helping each of us to achieve more of our potential. I’ve written elsewhere about the imperative to shift from institutional models based on scalable efficiency to ones based on scalable learning.

But here’s the rub, we will never learn fast enough unless we’re motivated to learn faster and the most powerful form of motivation is intrinsic – it comes from what I’ve described as the passion of the explorer. That form of passion is ultimately a manifestation of our spiritset – it emerges from our quest to achieve far more of our potential.

Today, our research suggests that only about 14% of workers in the US have this form of passion in their work. That’s a natural and inevitable consequence of building institutions that fail to recognize the importance of spiritsets.

Scalable learning requires intense motivation which requires passion which requires cultivating our spiritset. It all goes back to spiritset.

The journey to nurture spiritset
So, how do we nurture our spiritset? We need to begin by acknowledging that it exists and that it has extraordinary power. That will motivate us to look within and invest the time and effort required to explore the force that ultimately defines who we are. We need to reflect on what truly drives us and what will enable us to achieve more of our potential. As we do this, we need to seek out others who have embarked on a similar journey. And then we need to work together to shape institutions and communities that actively seek to address the needs of our spiritset, helping all of us to achieve more of our potential. It won’t be easy, because so many of us have lived so long without even acknowledging our spiritset, much less learning about its needs and power, but the rewards will be enormous for us as individuals and as a society.

Bottom line
We’re complex beings, and we need to learn how to embrace that complexity. We’re also capable of achieving infinite potential, but only if we embrace the complexity that makes us human. Let’s resist the temptation to simplify, because that will only limit our potential. Let’s dive deep beneath our mindset and heartset and explore the foundation that ultimately defines who we are. As we move into an exponential world shaped by exponential technology, this will be the key to unleashing our intrinsically human ability to drive exponential performance improvement for ourselves.

I’m writing this in Athens, Greece. I’ve always had deep admiration for those brave early explorers like Aristotle and Socrates who had the curiosity and wisdom to learn more about who we really are. They’ve inspired me to write this. We have yet to discover fully who we really are.

Mindset and Heartset

Is mindset all there is? I recently attended a gathering of senior executives seeking to drive change in their organizations and was struck by how much mindset dominated the conversation. It was all about the assumptions and beliefs of the people in their organizations. They wanted to know what kind of evidence and reasoning would help to change these assumptions and beliefs.

The key assumption in the room was that it was all about the mind. They assumed that our assumptions and beliefs shape what we feel and what we do. In this view of the world, emotions are a distraction, or at best a second order effect, and it’s ultimately all about our mind.

Expanding our view
I would suggest that we’re a lot more complicated than that. Our emotions aren’t just derivative of our assumptions and beliefs. Emotions shape our perceptions, assumptions, thoughts and beliefs as well. If you try to shape assumptions and beliefs without paying attention to the emotions that already exist, good luck.

We need to move beyond mindset and expand our horizons to address our heartset: what are the emotions that filter how we perceive the world, shape what we believe and influence how we act? If we’re really excited about something, do we perceive risks in the same way as someone who is deeply fearful? If we were just deeply hurt emotionally by someone, are we likely to trust that person, even if all the objective data suggests we should? If someone showed us compassion at a time of great need, are we more likely help that person, even if it might mean falling behind on our assigned tasks?

Why are we so focused on mindset?
Our preoccupation with mindset is understandable. It’s a natural outgrowth of engineering and managerial beliefs that shaped the scalable efficiency cultures that dominate all our institutions today. In these cultures, the belief is that if you have the right data and perform the right analytics you can deliver whatever is needed. The key is to break down complex issues into their component parts. Keep it simple. Work is broken down into tightly defined tasks that are highly standardized throughout the institution – all you have to do is to read the manual and deliver what’s expected. Everything has to be predictable – that’s the way to increase efficiency.

The focus on mindset has even deeper roots. If we go back to the Enlightenment from the late 1600’s to the early 1800’s, the key message from the great thinkers of that time was to celebrate the power of the mind and all that it could accomplish. It’s not an accident that this era was also known as the “Age of Reason.” The mind is of course a powerful vehicle for driving amazing insights and accomplishments and should be celebrated. But there’s a risk that we reduce everything to the mind. It’s all about ideas and reason. The body is just a distraction or, at best, something to be nurtured because it holds our mind. Life is so much more complicated than that.

Maybe we should dive into heartset to understand some of the reasons mindset has such a strong hold on us. Perhaps the attachment to mindset is at least in part a result of our fear of failure and desire to project strength. We live in a complex world that’s always evolving, often in unanticipated ways. That can be very scary, especially for the masculine archetype.

I’ve written about the masculine and feminine archetype before. In the masculine archetype, the key is to project strength – you understand the situation and you are in control of the situation. The best way to do this is to simplify things and subject them to rigorous analysis. Avoid messy and difficult to understand things like emotions and relationships – focus instead on reason, numbers and transactions. This becomes even more urgent as the world becomes more connected and complex.

The feminine archetype embraces this complexity – it sees each of us as a very complex being driven by heart and mind and shaped by the hearts and minds around us. It understands that deep and lasting relationships can only emerge if we understand that complexity and seek to nurture its growth, while also understanding that we ultimately cannot control that complexity, either in ourselves or in others.

So, life is complex. I can hear my executive friends saying: OK, but what about change? How do I motivate people to change? Well, I wish I could say that the answer is easy but, as you might expect by now, my answer is that it’s complex.

Embrace our complexity
It starts with the need to move beyond mindset. Numbers and charts alone are not going to drive the change required. Seek to understand the heartset – the fears and hopes that are motivating the actions of those in the organization (and don’t forget those outside the organization that help to shape the heartset of those within the organization). Of course, it’s not just about heartset – we need to explore the complex interplay between mindset and heartset. The real insight will come by exploring the edges between these two domains and understanding the dynamics of how one shapes the other and vice versa. And don’t just look at individuals in isolation, look at them in the context of their networks of relationships and how the mindsets and heartsets of others are shaping their own being.

Feel the fear
OK, that’s very complex. How do we move forward and drive change? Well, the answer is certainly going to differ depending on the context, but there’s a generalization that I think is becoming more and more relevant. More and more of us are being driven by fear – that is becoming a dominant emotion, and it is increasingly shaping our mindset. Many factors are fostering this fear, but one key factor is the mounting performance pressure that is a product of the Big Shift transforming our global economy and society.

The challenge is that most of us live in institutional cultures that actively discourage us from expressing fear. Fear is interpreted as a sign of weakness. We’re supposed to be bold and confident. So, for many of us, those feelings of fear are deeply hidden. We need to look deeply to find the fear. And we need to focus on finding ways to help people overcome their growing fear and nurture feelings of hope and excitement.

Nurture the passion
How do we do that? Based on research that we’ve done at the Center for the Edge, one powerful way to help people make this journey is to help them find and embrace their passion. Passion is a very loosely used word, so let me clarify that we’ve discovered a very specific form of passion – the passion of the explorer – that can be a powerful motivator for learning and change. The challenge is that very few people today have this form of passion with regard to their work – our surveys suggest that only around 12% of workers in the US workforce have this form of passion.

I’ve come to believe that we all have this passion within us, waiting to be discovered and nurtured. Perhaps there’s another dimension to us as humans – perhaps in addition to mindset and heartset, there’s also a spiritset – a unique energy with us that ultimately defines who we are and that calls us to find it and nurture it so that we can achieve more of our potential. But, I digress – I’ll save that exploration for another blog post.

Back to passion. Some of us were fortunate enough to discover this passion within us at an early age, but many of us are still looking for it. Unfortunately, even more of us have given up on the quest, since we’ve fallen prey to the message that this is a fool’s errand, that the key to success is to listen carefully to the boss, and follow directions carefully and reliably. Many of us have also succumbed to growing fear and come to believe that passion is a luxury that we simply can’t afford to pursue – we just need to do what we can to survive for another day.

If we find a way to connect with the passion within each of us, we’ll quickly find that our dominant emotions become hope and excitement – we’re deeply motivated to achieve an increasing impact in the domain defined by our passion. Fear recedes in the face of the opportunity to make more of a difference in an area that’s meaningful to us. This form of passion also motivates us to connect with others who share our passion in order to achieve even more of an impact – and those connections help to amplify our hope and excitement because we’re receiving constant encouragement from others. We no longer feel isolated, but instead deeply connected in our effort to address exciting opportunities.

Craft opportunity based narratives
So, how do we connect with and draw out this passion? That deserves much more exploration (perhaps even a book), but for the moment let me draw attention to the power of narrative. Those who have been following me know that I make an important distinction between stories and narratives, even though most people use these to mean the same thing. I believe narratives are different from stories on two levels. First, they are open-ended, rather than self-contained – there is no resolution yet, but there is some kind of major opportunity or threat out in the future. It’s not clear whether the opportunity or threat will be realized, but the resolution of the narrative hinges on you – your choices and actions will determine how the narrative resolves. Narratives the way I define them are a powerful call to action.

Narratives have enormous emotional appeal. Throughout human history, millions of people have sacrificed their lives in pursuit of a narrative. Opportunity based narratives are particularly powerful in drawing out and nurturing the passion of the explorer because they frame a large and inspiring opportunity that can help build excitement about the ability to make a difference. These narratives also pull together people who share this passion and the collaboration helps to reinforce and amplify this passion.

Avoid manipulation
As we begin to understand and appreciate the importance of emotions in driving the behavior of people in our institutions, we need to avoid the temptation to try to manipulate emotions to achieve our goals. Manipulation may yield short-term results, but it’s rarely sustainable. In fact, it usually backfires – when people realize they are being manipulated, they lose trust and become even more resistant to the agendas being pursued. If the efforts to shape emotions are not driven by an authentic desire to cultivate a new set of emotions, they will fail. Institutional narratives can be powerful but they need to be authentic and lived on a daily basis by those who craft the narratives.

The bottom line
Our institutions have cultivated a very narrow and misleading view of ourselves as people. As change accelerates on a global scale, we’ll find it very challenging to shift from mounting performance pressure to expanding opportunity if we hold onto that narrow view. Until we recognize and address the heartset that shapes our actions, and its complex interactions with our mindset, we’ll find that fear and stress will increase resistance to change. On the other hand, if we can draw out hope and excitement, we’ll find that we’ll be able to learn and change at an accelerating rate. Our heartset can be both the barrier and the enabler of change – it’s up to us which one will prevail.

Ode to Trees

I stand in awe of trees.
They bend with the wind
But they stand their ground.
They stand tall
Yet constantly reach for the sky
Branching in so many directions,
Searching for the sun and stars
While firmly rooted in one place.
They can stand alone,
But they seek out each other
And live longer together.
They appear silent
But they actively communicate
Not only with each other
But with many other living things
In the ground.
Their energy
Comes from connection.
Trees embody
The best of the feminine
And the masculine.
We can learn so much from them.
I dream of living
In a home held
In the warm embrace
Of the branches of a tree.

The Journey Begins

As we return from our summer holidays, this may be a good time to reflect on the journeys that we are on. A key part of my journey has been writing, but all my writing has been non-fiction (at least as far as I know).

Recently, I’ve felt a pull into poetry, something I had never considered. I made a first tentative stab with a short poem that I posted on social media on July 5 and I got such an encouraging response that it motivated me to take the next step.

What journey are you on?

We are all on a journey.
But many of us are following paths
Shaped by others,
Seeking to please
Or get promoted.
Few of us have made the effort
To reflect on our destination
And craft our own.
Pursuing our own destination
will require us
To forge our own path.
Many of us are afraid
To venture off the well-traveled paths
Because we can’t see the full path ahead.
But all we need
Is to begin with the first step
And embrace the experience of moving forward
So that we learn as we go.
Open the door now
And step outside
Beyond your comfort zone
Even though the path
May not yet be clear.
If we dare to explore,
Who knows what wonderful lands
We might discover
And who we might become?

And for those who are interested to see my first poetry venture from a couple of months ago, here it is:
Many of us
are on a journey
to evolve
from human doings to human beings.
But let's not stop there.
Let's claim our true nature as human becomings,
constantly exploring and evolving,
and achieving more of our potential,
for we are truly made
of the earth and the stars.

The Real Value of Labor

It’s Labor Day in the US, so what better day to reflect on how misunderstood workers are?

Truth be told, workers are often viewed as a cost by many institutions. In fact, that’s where they appear on financial statements – they’re a major expense item on the income statement. That view of workers naturally sets up an “us vs. them” and “win/lose” mindset. The institution wins when it can eliminate workers, make them work longer hours for the same pay or pay them less, but the workers lose. That adversarial mentality, in fact, was the genesis of the US labor movement.

Workers as human capital

Ah, but all is not lost, we now have come to view workers as “human capital.” Let’s ignore for the moment that they still appear on the income statement and not on the balance sheet where all other capital resides. Let’s also leave aside the notion of capital as inherently dehumanizing as well as the implication that we “own” human capital, like we own all other forms of capital. What does “human capital” mean?

Well, think about it for a moment. Most “capital” is in the form of physical assets and those assets depreciate, or lose value, over time. Perhaps it’s our implicit recognition that workers age over time and, consistent with our prevalent “ageist” bias, lose value as they age. So, does human capital depreciate over time?

But, wait a minute, some assets don’t depreciate, they are fixed in value – think about many financial assets like cash in the bank (yes, there’s some modest interest that accrues) or accounts receivable. OK, should we think about human capital as having fixed value – a given set of skills and credentials that can deliver fixed value over time?

Workers as learners

I would suggest these views of labor miss the real opportunity for institutions and for workers themselves. We humans have limitless potential that can be cultivated and drawn out over time. Workers have the ability to learn – and we can evolve institutions that can help them learn faster and faster over time, together.

I can hear many executives now saying: but we’re focused on learning, we already have training programs. And, by the way, those training programs cost money and who knows whether the workers will stay with us long enough for us to earn a return on our investment? (Can you see the pattern? There’s a strong tendency to reduce everything, including humans, to financial matters).

Sure, training programs have a role to play in learning. But that’s not the kind of learning I’m talking about. Training programs are about sharing existing knowledge. The most powerful and valuable form of learning in a rapidly changing economy and society is learning in the form of creating new knowledge – seeing problems and opportunities that have never been seen before and coming up with new approaches to address those problems and opportunities in ways that create growing value and impact. That kind of learning occurs day to day on the job, not in some training room.

And there’s another powerful dimension to this form of learning. This form of learning occurs through action that delivers impact, not by sitting in a room reading books. Now, we’ve flipped the conventional economic model of learning. Rather than spending money upfront to train workers and hoping some day to earn a return on that investment, this form of learning requires an immediate return in terms of added value. The learning comes afterward from seeing what actions can actually generate the greatest impact. New value comes first and the learning follows. If we adopt this mindset, labor is now about learning, everywhere and all the time.

Institutional implications

What if we systematically attempted to redesign all of our work environments to foster this kind of learning? But to really reap the benefits of this work environment redesign, we would also need to dig in and fundamentally redefine what we mean by work. Today, most work is defined as tightly specified and highly standardized routine tasks – there’s no room to learn there. That’s why we have training rooms.

As technology takes over more and more of these routine tasks (thank the Lord!), we have an opportunity to redefine work as addressing unseen problems and opportunities that can unleash much more value. That kind of work requires a very different set of practices that need to be cultivated within small workgroups throughout the organization.

But to redefine work, we need to challenge some of the basic mindsets that drive the operation of most of our large institutions around the world. Most of our institutions today are governed by the scalable efficiency mindset – the best way to create value is to become more and more efficient at scale. It’s all about doing things faster and cheaper at scale.

As I’ve written elsewhere, we need to engage in a form of innovation that is not yet on the management agenda, but needs to be. That’s institutional innovation – starting by shifting our mindset from one of scalable efficiency to one of scalable learning. In the scalable learning mindset, the focus shifts to creating more and more value by finding ways to help all workers learn faster together on the job, in their day to day work environment. If we take that seriously, it requires us to rethink all aspects of our existing institutions and find innovative ways of organizing, leading and operating our institutions.

So, this quickly becomes complicated and challenging. It won’t be easy, but the rewards will be significant. In fact, as we’ve shown before, scalable efficiency is producing diminishing returns, as confirmed by the long and sustained erosion of return on assets for all US public companies. This isn’t just an opportunity. It’s an imperative in a world of mounting performance pressure. Those who don’t figure this out and embark on the journey are going to find themselves marginalized.

The opportunity for both workers and institutions

And what’s one of the most awesome aspects of this journey? Instead of holding on to the “win/lose” dynamic that has governed our scalable efficiency institutions, we now have an opportunity to shift to a “win/win” dynamic where workers can achieve more and more of their potential while creating more and more value for the institution. As we begin to see that there is an expanding pie for everyone, we will find greater willingness to share the growth of that pie with all who have contributed to its growth. We will finally have tapped into the true Power of Pull – in our book, we described three levels of pull and the highest form of pull is to achieve, to pull out more and more of the potential that we individually and collectively have within us.

I've framed this opportunity in economic terms because that’s the way to engage leaders of most institutions that are still driven by the scalable efficiency mindset. But the real rewards here are not just economic – they are deeply personal and social. We will find ways to connect with each other in much deeper and more meaningful ways that build trust and inspire us to accomplish so much more together. We as humans all have an innate desire to develop more of our potential and to make a bigger difference in whatever environment we find ourselves in. We all have a desire to build deeper relationships with those around us that can help us all to accomplish more together. It’s so much more than dollars and cents.

The bottom line

Perhaps our future Labor Days will focus on celebrating the fact that we’ve come together to achieve something that none of us could have accomplished on our own and that we’ve all been increasingly rewarded for that effort. And perhaps we’ll celebrate that every day, and not just Labor Day!

Navigating From the Industrial Age to the Contextual Age

In the Industrial Age, scalable efficiency drove value creation. The bargain of the Industrial Age was that, if consumers wanted affordable products and services, we would have to settle for standardized products and services – one size fits all. You can have any color as long as it’s black. It’s a bargain that drove the growth of mass consumer societies in developed and developing economies.

And it shaped the scalable efficiency model that drives virtually all our institutions today – the key to success is to become more and more efficient at scale. Efficiency requires tight specification and standardization of tasks throughout the institution and tightly integrating those tasks into end to end business processes. It is very much supply driven, since the demand was willing to settle for standardized products. The winners would be those who could produce the most cost-efficient products at scale. In a world of standardized products and tasks, context was largely irrelevant, a distraction. Focus on the standardized product and process.

The world is changing

Now, that’s all changing. The forces shaping the Big Shift are progressively undermining standardization and efficiency (as conventionally defined) as drivers of value creation. As consumers, we’re gaining more and more power and we’re less and less willing to settle for standardized products and services – we want offerings that are tailored to our unique and evolving needs. On the supply side, digital technology is making it easier and far more affordable to produce highly personalized products and services. That’s leading to more and more fragmentation in product and services businesses, something that I’ve explored here.

As these forces play out, context is becoming more and more central to value creation. If we don’t pay attention to the circumstances surrounding a person or an event, we’re unlikely to understand how to create the greatest personalized value. Those who are most insightful and adept at understanding context, will be those who create the most value, both for customers and for themselves.

Exploring the many dimensions of context

So, what is context? In my experience, we’re much too simplistic in our framing of context. Context tends to be viewed as a snapshot of the circumstances immediately surrounding an individual or event. If you want to serve the needs of a consumer who is cooking a meal, it helps to understand what meal is being cooked in the moment and what that consumer values in terms of the meal that will be produced. Certainly that helps, but is that all there is?

Context across space. Context is fractal – there’s a never-ending series of broader contexts within which any specific context is embedded. Take the context of the consumer cooking a meal. Who else might be sharing in that meal? What is their broader network of friends and family and how might that shape the way they view this meal? What is the broader community that these friends and family reside in and how is that shaping the meal experience? What region and country does that community reside in?

Context across time. But that’s not all. Context doesn’t just expand across space at any point in time. It also expands across time – both into the past and into the future. We have a much deeper understanding of a person or event if we can situate them in a broader arc of experiences that are playing out over time. It’s especially valuable if we can anticipate how the context might evolve so that we can address needs that haven’t yet surfaced, but will soon become very important. In a more rapidly changing world, we need to understand that context is dynamic – it will evolve rapidly and could fundamentally change in a short time span.

Context as a complex adaptive system. We don’t just need to understand the components of context, we need to understand how those components interact with each other and connect into ever more complex systems and understand how those systems are evolving. In short, we need to understand context as a complex adaptive system.

Context within. A key element of these complex adaptive systems is people. We are complex in isolation but become even more complex in the context of our interactions with others. Our understanding of context will not be complete unless we delve deeply into the psychology of the people who inhabit the context – we need to gain insight into the emotions and perceptions of their context that shape their own behavior. They often don’t see the context in the same way that we might. But we often get consumed by the “objective” elements of context, those things which can be measured and lose sight of the much more qualitative human elements of context.

Context of others. And it’s not just about customer context. As our work becomes more and more tailored to specific problems and opportunities and as we expand our ecosystems to leverage the expertise and capabilities of others in a much more flexible manner, we need to better understand the evolving contexts of everyone in our ecosystems, including the people who work within our institutions.

Context to be shaped. Finally, let me also caution against understanding context only as a passive observer. We in fact have significant opportunity to shape contexts. First we need to understand the context as it exists on its own but, if we truly understand the dynamics that are shaping the context over time, we’re likely to see opportunities to shape that context. In fact, that’s one of the reasons why I‘ve become increasingly interested in the role of opportunity based narratives – as an inspiring call to action, they can motivate people outside our institutions to take action in ways that could significantly alter their contexts.

Welcome to the Contextual Age

In this context, let me return to why I resist describing our current era as the Information Age. Coming from Silicon Valley, I can certainly understand the fascination with the proliferation of data that’s generated by our digital infrastructures. But the data is only valuable if we use it to gain more insight into evolving contexts. My concern is that we can get easily distracted by the data and focus on generating more and more of it, without understanding how to use that data to create value. True to our scalable efficiency institutional models, we’re largely using that data to drive more efficiency in our operations.

What institutions will have the greatest impact in the future? It will be those who shift their focus and learn how to harness that data to generate greater insight into expanding levels of context and to see new opportunities to add value in those contexts. In fact, the ability to generate and access much of the data that’s relevant to context will increasingly depend upon the trust of the participants. One of the best ways to build trust is to show a deep understanding of context and, even better, to deliver more value tailored to that context. We’ll never build deep trust-based relationships with others without a much richer understanding of their context. Those who do not build this trust will find it more and more challenging to access the data in the first place.

That’s why I suggest describing our current era as the Contextual Age. Yes, data and information is a key enabler of value, but it’s the deep understanding of context that will generate the value. It’s the reason we described the previous era as the Industrial Age, rather than the Machine Age. Machines were a key enabler of value but it was the industrial organizational model that generated the economic value from those machines.

Seeing more

So, if we’re in the Contextual Age, what actions should we be taking to generate value? That’s probably the focus of another round of blog posts, but let me just quickly summarize some actions that will help to gain greater insight into context.

Look ahead. Don’t get consumed by snapshots of the relevant contexts. Make an effort to look ahead and understand the forces that are shaping these contexts and what these contexts might look like many years from now. There’s no better way to create value than to anticipate unmet needs.

Look around. Don’t just look at narrowly defined contexts. Expand your horizons to look at the contexts of those contexts and how they might shape the more narrowly defined contexts. Also, explore seemingly unrelated contexts to see what insights they might offer about the contexts you’re addressing.

Look again. We often take context for granted because we’ve seen it before. We need to adopt a beginner’s mindset and explore context as it it’s completely new. We may surprise ourselves and find elements of the context that we never noticed before.

Look within. Seek to gain insight into the emotions and aspirations of the participants in the contexts you’re addressing. Objective contexts matter, but what really shapes value is understanding what motivates participants in these contexts.

Look for impact that matters. As we gain more insight into what motivates participants in the contexts around us, we can begin to understand much more deeply what value really matters to them and how to achieve an impact that will be more meaningful to them.

Look together. Find a diverse group of people to explore contexts with you. Understanding contexts is not a solitary effort, it needs to be a collaborative effort. No matter how observant any one of us is, we’re likely to find that others, especially if they come from different backgrounds and perspectives, are likely to see things that we completely missed. And encourage the group to challenge each other in terms of what they’re seeing – I call it “productive friction.” We’re likely to see a lot more if we look together.

Act and reflect. Don’t just observe. Have a bias towards action so that you can learn more about the contexts by observing how they evolve in response to your actions. And take the time to reflect on what impact your actions had so that you can gain even more insight into the context.

Bottom line

If we take context seriously, that can be a significant driver of learning. In a world that’s more rapidly changing, going exponential, as some might say, learning is an imperative. We expand our horizons and better understand the forces that are shaping the environments within which we operate. To be clear, this isn’t about learning in the form of sharing existing new knowledge; it’s about learning in the form of creating new knowledge. Every context is unique and every context is evolving at an accelerating pace. To truly understand our contexts, we need to pull ourselves out of the classroom and immerse ourselves in the context, take action based on growing understanding of the context, and then learn even more as we reflect on the impact that we’ve achieved.

If we take this seriously and mobilize others to join us in this effort, we might begin to harness scalable learning. The paradox is that scalable learning is much more efficient than scalable efficiency in a rapidly changing world. But it’s far more – it’s a way to unleash increasing returns that come from focusing on delivering more and more meaningful value in the contexts that we’re addressing. Another key dimension of the Big Shift is the shift from scalable efficiency to scalable learning as the rationale for our institutions.

True Transformation: From the Caterpillar to the Butterfly

What is transformation?

Transformation has become one of the most over-used and loosely used words in the business world globally. Everyone’s talking about it and everyone’s claiming to be doing it.

Virtually every large company that I know has a “digital transformation” program. They’re all totally committed to “transformation.”

But, when I look under the covers, what do I find? With few exceptions, those “digital transformation” programs are focused on deploying digital technology across the company to do what the company has always done, just faster and cheaper. It is the latest manifestation of the scalable efficiency mindset that has driven all our institutions over at least the past century. The goal is to get more efficient, by whatever means necessary.

But, is that really transformation? Here we get into semantics and, of course, the word can mean whatever you want it to mean.
Let me just say that, for me, transformation is something much more fundamental. The metaphor I like to use is the caterpillar transforming into a butterfly. The caterpillar isn’t just slimming down and crawling faster. The caterpillar is now a completely different entity, not just in terms of appearance, but in terms of actions, needs and capabilities. Looking at the two side by side, you would never imagine that the two were in any way related, much less the same. That’s transformation.

So, if we move from caterpillars to companies, what does transformation mean? It means going back to the most basic questions of all and using them to redefine your identity – to become a butterfly. Those questions include:

• What market are we in?
• What business are we in?
• How do we compete?
• What are our metrics for success?

If the answers to those questions are not fundamentally different from what they were yesterday, you may be evolving, but you’re not transforming.

Does this matter? Yes, because we’re living in an exponential world where change is accelerating. If we remain the same, or settle for incremental change, we’re likely to be increasingly marginalized and ultimately meet an unfortunate demise. The imperative for transformation is made clear by the significant and sustained erosion in return on assets for all public companies in the US and the compression of corporate life spans on the S&P 500.

So, if transformation is an imperative and incremental change is a death sentence, how do we embark on that transformation journey?

Rethink strategy

We can begin by rethinking strategy. We need to move beyond the five year plan and instead focus on two very different time horizons – 10-20 years and 6-12 months. This is the zoom out, zoom in approach to strategy that I’ve written about elsewhere.

The 10-20 year horizon forces us out of our comfort zone and challenges us to provide very different answers to the questions I framed earlier. If you truly understand the exponential forces that are re-shaping our global economy, you could not possibly believe you will be in the same market or operating the same kind of business 10-20 years from now. Your most basic assumptions about the business will be challenged.

The 6-12 month horizon forces us to commit to near-term action that will begin to drive the transformation process. It helps us to focus in a more challenging world where the temptation is to spread ourselves too thinly as we seek to sense and respond to everything that is going on.

Reframe innovation

There’s another approach that can help us on our transformation journey. That involves reframing innovation. Today, when executives focus on innovation, they quickly narrow their focus to product or service innovation. Some manage to even address process innovation or business model innovation. But that’s where they stop.

They fail to recognize that there’s a deeper level of innovation that needs to be addressed – something that I call “institutional innovation” and explored in this report. Institutional innovation goes to the most basic question of all, which is why do we have large organizations? The traditional answer has been scalable efficiency – it’s far easier and lower cost to coordinate activity across a large number of people if they’re all in one institution, than when they’re spread out across many institutions. There’s reason to believe that reason is becoming much less compelling.

If that reason is less compelling, is there another rationale that will drive the success of large institutions in the future? I believe there is – it’s scalable learning. The reason we will come together in large institutions in the future is the opportunity to learn faster than we ever could if we stayed on our own or as part of a smaller institution.

That’s a fundamentally different institutional rationale and conflicts deeply with the rationale of scalable efficiency. If we take scalable learning seriously, it will force us to re-think and innovate across all dimensions of our institutions – how we organize, how we mobilize, how we measure success and how we connect with others outside our institution. It's ultimately the most powerful form of innovation because it will unleash the potential for far more innovation at the product, process and business model levels.

Scale the edge

Recognizing the need for institutional innovation will then increase our commitment to transformation. Everything will need to change in our institutions. That caterpillar will need to become a butterfly.

But how? The traditional approach to transformation – what I call the “top down, big bang” approach to transformation – has a very high failure rate. The failure rate is driven by the strength of the immune system and the antibodies that reside in every large institution and that are very effective at mobilizing at the first sign of an effort to change the way things are done. Never, ever underestimate the power of the immune system.

Rather than trying to confront the immune system with a massive spending program that will endure for years in an effort to transform the core of the institution, my advice is to drive transformation by scaling an edge of the institution. An edge is a part of the institution that today has limited revenue or impact but, if you understand the exponential forces that are shaping the broader economy and society, has the potential to scale very rapidly to the point where it becomes the new core of the institution – it is not just a diversification effort or a growth effort, it is an effort to replace the existing core with a new, transformed core.

Resist the temptation to take that edge and try to push it back into the existing core to serve as a catalyst for transformation there. The immune system and antibodies are very effective at recognizing that foreign body and mobilizing to crush it quickly. Instead, focus on scaling the edge as rapidly as possible and, over time, pull more and more of the people and resources from the core out to the edge. That edge can serve as the cocoon for the birth of a beautiful butterfly that can fly to places that the caterpillar would never have imagined, much less attempted to reach.

The bottom line

Transformation is an imperative in a world of exponential change. But the “transformations” that we are currently attempting are unlikely to get us from where we are today to where we need to be.

We need to take inspiration from the caterpillar that somehow finds a way to transform into a butterfly.

One problem with the caterpillar/butterfly metaphor is it suggests we need to embark on a journey from one fixed object to another fixed object. The real win in an exponential world is to find out how to transform into something that will keep transforming as the pace of change further accelerates. That’s the power of the scalable learning institutional model – it provides us with the tools and approaches to embark on a continual transformation journey.

Re-Building Trust in Our Institutions

I wrote about the trust paradox about 8 years ago. The paradox is that we all say that trust is increasingly important, yet trust is rapidly eroding in all institutions worldwide. How could that be? If trust is so important, why are we not building institutions and adopting practices that can amplify trust, rather than erode it?

In my previous blog post, I tried to explain why we’ve been unable to resolve this paradox. At a high level, my explanation suggested that the very practices that helped us to build trust in the past are now contributing to the erosion of trust. The harder we work at building trust, the more rapidly it erodes. I went into a lot more detail in that blog post on why this is the case.

In the intervening years, trust has continued to erode in all our institutions globally. What surprises me is that, while this erosion is widely reported, few people seem to be focused on understanding why this is happening, much less addressing the issue. Of course, there’s a tendency to focus on slices. Liberals and socialists tend to put all the blame on corporations and greedy capitalists. Free market advocates tend to blame the government. What everyone seems to ignore is that this is a much broader issue, extending across all institutions around the world. Effectively resolving this paradox will require re-examining the foundation of all our institutions, not just a segment.

In the years since I wrote my original post, I’ve continued to reflect on what is fueling this paradox and what will be required to resolve the paradox. I stand by the perspective that I offered in the original post but, as always, there are more dimensions to be explored.

Fear and trust

In my earlier post, I didn’t highlight the psychological dimension that is contributing to the erosion of trust. As I’ve discussed elsewhere, we are in the earliest stages of a Big Shift in our global economy that produces mounting performance pressure on all of us, as individuals and institutions. As humans, we have a natural psychological tendency when confronted with fear to magnify our perception of risk and discount our perception of reward, we therefore tend to shrink our time horizons, just focusing on the present and, as a result, we tend to fall into a zero sum view of the world (it’s a win/lose proposition) and trust erodes because at the end of the day we know only one of us is going to win and the rest will lose. At an emotional level, fear begins to prevail.
So, part of the erosion of trust is that we, as individuals, are becoming less trusting. But that’s not all.

The trap of scalable efficiency

As I’ve written elsewhere, all our institutions today have been built on a model of scalable efficiency. The key is to tightly specify all tasks, highly standardize them and tightly integrate them. It’s very much a command and control model – the best way to be efficient is to tightly control everything. It prompts institutional leaders to look inward because that’s where the efficiency gains are greatest. Since the key to efficiency is tight control, everything outside the firm is viewed with suspicion and fear – it’s far better to bring everything inside so that it can be tightly controlled.

In the scalable efficiency institutional model, asking questions is a sign of weakness. You don’t know the answer? Go back and read the manual.

All these tendencies are reinforced in an environment of mounting performance pressure. We need to squeeze harder and become more self-sufficient if we’re going to survive. We also need to get bigger as institutions so that we can squeeze everyone outside our institution harder as we gain more scale and bargaining power. We can’t trust anyone that we can’t control, so is it any surprise that those outside our institutions lose trust in us?

The big shift from scalable efficiency to scalable learning

If we’re going to extricate ourselves from this spiral of eroding trust, we need to undertake what I call “institutional innovation”, reassessing at a fundamental level the core rationale for our institutions. We need to challenge the prevailing rationale – scalable efficiency – and replace it with an alternative rationale – scalable learning. In a world of accelerating change and increasing volatility, if we’re not learning faster, we’ll be increasingly marginalized.

To be clear, when I talk about learning here, I’m not talking about training programs or reading books. That’s about transmitting existing knowledge. In a more rapidly changing world, the most powerful form of learning is creation of new knowledge. If we’re serious about creating new knowledge, it increases the importance of learning through action since we need the feedback loops to help us gain even more insight and ideas. It also increases the importance of learning with others since, no matter how smart any one of us is, we’ll learn a lot more if we come together with others from different backgrounds and perspectives in a shared quest to achieve growing impact. Most importantly, scalable learning requires us to reach out beyond our institution and to find ways to build deep-trust based relationships with others who have relevant expertise and knowledge so that we can learn with them.

A commitment to scalable learning helps to build trust because it inherently requires us to acknowledge that we don’t know everything and that we want to address questions, problems and opportunities for which we don’t yet have answers. In other words, we have to express vulnerability and, as I suggested in my earlier post, that's a key to building trust.

The role of narratives in building trust

That leads me to the topic of narratives, something that I have written extensively about, starting here. For those who haven’t followed me on this journey, I make a distinction between stories and narratives, even though most people treat these two words as synonyms. For me a story is self-contained – it has a beginning, middle and an end. Also, stories are about me the story teller or some other people – they are not about you in the audience.

In contrast, for me, narratives are open-ended, there is no resolution – yet. There’s some kind of significant opportunity or threat out in the future and it’s not clear whether it will be effectively addressed. The resolution of the narrative hinges on you, the listener. It is a call to action since your choices and your actions will help to resolve this narrative.

So, what’s the role of narratives in building trust? As I’ve suggested elsewhere, narratives express vulnerability. They’re a call to action because the individual/institution framing the narrative is at least implicitly acknowledging that they can’t address the threat or opportunity on their own. They need help and they’re asking for help.

And, by the way, opportunity based narratives are far more effective at building trust because they suggest that everyone can benefit from the opportunity. Threat based narratives play to the fears that many of us already have and tend to make trust more challenging – if my life or well-being is at stake, can I really afford to trust those who might be part of the threat? Opportunity based narratives, on the other hand, can be very effective in overcoming the fear that more and more of us feel as we experience mounting performance pressure. Yes, there are challenges ahead, but there's an opportunity that can significantly improve our condition.

At the institutional level, narratives also shift the focus from inside to outside. By (my) definition, an institutional narrative is a call to action to those outside the institution. It defines an opportunity that's inspiring and motivating for those outside the institution and calls them to come together to help achieve the opportunity. If framed in the right way, it also builds trust in the sense that the institution is not just focused on its own needs, but on the needs of others and is committed to investing time and effort to help others to achieve some meaningful opportunity.

Opportunity based narratives are also a powerful way to unleash scalable learning. These narratives define an opportunity at a high level, but tangible enough to be credible and inspiring. They leave a lot of room for learning what that opportunity truly requires and, most importantly, for learning about the actions required to ultimately achieve that opportunity. By focusing on a meaningful opportunity and inviting others to join together, narratives provide motivation to learn faster, together. As people find that they are learning faster, together, they develop a deeper trust in each other, as well as in the institution that framed the narrative that brought them together.

The bottom line

Institutional narratives can be a promising way to build and sustain trust with people outside the organization. They can also be a powerful catalyst in helping to shift institutions to a scalable learning mindset and model. But they cannot do this on their own. Avoid the temptation to pick up the phone and call your PR agency to craft a narrative for your institution. To be credible, narratives must be lived every day by the people in the institution. Words don’t persuade people to trust; actions do.

Opportunity based narratives will require institutions to embark on a transformation journey in order to be credible. Unfortunately there’s a very powerful immune system and antibodies ready to mobilize to crush any attempts to transform an organization. Never, ever under-estimate the power of that immune system. It is a key reason why all institutions have remained wedded to the scalable efficiency model for so long, even as evidence mounts that that model is less and less effective. To succeed in the transformation journey, institutions will need to find ways to scale the edge, rather than trying to transform the core. The good news is that a powerful narrative can be very helpful in scaling the edge much more rapidly and with far less resources than might have been required even a few decades ago.

Shaping Serendipity through Narrative

We all want to be lucky, but we generally feel there's little we can do about it. I’ve long challenged the conventional view that luck is just something that happens to us and that there’s little we can do other than be prepared for it when it happens.

I believe that we can significantly alter the probabilities of luck through choices we make on a daily basis – something that I’ve called “shaping serendipity.” On a very different front, I’ve been exploring for years the power of narrative and, as it turns out, one of the reasons narratives are so powerful is that they can shape serendipity. Let me flesh this out a bit.

Shaping serendipity

First, I’ll address the concept of shaping serendipity. I’m focusing on a specific form of luck – the luck of unexpected encounters with others that leads to new insights. I focus on connecting with others because it’s the gift that keeps on giving – rather than a one-time win like winning a lottery or finding a parking spot, meeting others can lead to a stream of insights, rather than just one new idea.

As I’ve written in the past, we can increase the probability of that kind of serendipity through a wide range of choices and actions. For example, we could choose environments that increase the likelihood of unexpected encounters that result in valuable new insights – e.g., we’re much more likely to have those unexpected encounters in a large city than a small village. Once we’re in those environments, we can adopt a set of practices that will attract the attention of people who turn out to have great insight relative to our interests. And once we have those encounters, we can adopt practices to increase the likelihood of surfacing the most valuable insights that lead to new discoveries.

Some background on narratives

So, there’s a lot we can do to shape serendipity – but what about narratives? What role could they play in materially increasing the probability of lucky encounters that bring us new insight?

Before I answer that question, let me clarify what I mean by narrative. For those who haven’t been following me, it’s important to note that I draw a major distinction between stories and narratives, even though most of us use these words as synonymous with each other.

For me, stories are self-contained – they have a beginning, a middle and an end. Stories are also about the story-teller or about some other people, they’re not about you, the listener. In contrast, for me, narratives are open-ended – there is no resolution, yet. There’s some kind of opportunity or threat out in the future and it’s not clear whether it will materialize or not. The resolution of the narrative hinges on you, the listener – the resolution will depend in part on the choices you make and the actions you take. So, a narrative is a call to action directed at the listeners, stressing the role that they can and need to play in resolving the narrative.

Narratives play an important role at many levels in our lives. We all have individual narratives (rarely made explicit), institutions have the potential to frame a narrative of their own (but surprisingly few do) and there are a variety of broader social and political narratives. Narratives can shape serendipity at all three levels. For reasons that will become apparent below, I’m going to focus in particular on opportunity-based narratives, rather than threat-based narratives.

The potential of narratives to shape serendipity

So, how can narratives help to shape serendipity? It’s simple – they harness the power of pull. Effectively framed narratives are designed to inspire and motivate others to come together with us to accomplish something that none of us could fully accomplish on our own. Serendipity is shaped in part by the ability to attract others – to draw people to us that we never knew existed and that we had no idea could contribute some really valuable insight in some area of interest to us.

How can we harness that ability to attract others? We need to frame an opportunity that will motivate people to seek us out. That requires an opportunity that’s deeply meaningful not just to ourselves, but to others well. It’s also important to identify an opportunity that can be shared by others – it’s not just about something that will benefit me, but something that we can all benefit from. It would be even more powerful if the opportunity grows as more and more people join the quest to achieve the opportunity. That way, we’re not just sharing a smaller and smaller piece of a fixed pie, but the pie is growing as participation grows. This provides a powerful sense of shared interest – the more who join us, the bigger and more attractive the opportunity becomes.

This can become a strong attractor. Word will spread rapidly that there’s an opportunity really worth pursuing. People are likely to surface from unexpected places, seeking to learn more about the opportunity and how they can participate.

There’s another key element of attraction in narratives. As mentioned, narratives are a powerful call to action but they’re also a plea for help. Narratives represent an acknowledgement that we, the crafters of the narrative, are unable to achieve this opportunity on our own – we need the help of others. That’s in part why the narrative is unresolved – until and unless we receive that help, the opportunity is unlikely to be realized. That acknowledgement helps to build trust – we’re admitting our own limitations and asking for help. So, not only are people motivated to seek us out and find us, they’re more likely to share ideas with us because there’s a level of trust that invites this sharing.

There’s a third element of narratives that helps to enhance the potential for serendipity – they encourage new ideas. Narratives frame an opportunity at a high level, with enough specificity to be credible and inspiring, but they don’t develop the opportunity in such detail that there’s nothing left to be said. The most inspiring narratives are those that invite exploration of the full richness of the opportunity and co-creation of the opportunity as it emerges and evolves. Narratives also leave a large open space regarding the detailed actions required to achieve the opportunity – there’s an invitation to join in crafting approaches that can have greater impact in achieving the opportunity and learning from the experiences to date.

So, narratives represent an invitation to contribute ideas at multiple levels – both in developing a deeper understanding of the opportunity ahead and in evolving more and more effective approaches to achieve that opportunity. As a result, people are motivated to exercise imagination and creativity even before they connect with others to pursue the opportunity. When they show up, they often have ideas that they want to share because they’ve already been inspired to come up with those ideas. Those initial conversations can generate a lot of new insight on both sides because everyone is motivated to seek out ways to achieve even more impact.

Talk about increasing the potential for serendipitous encounters! Narratives have the potential to attract people we never knew, brimming with ideas about an opportunity that’s meaningful to us and with enough trust to be willing to share those ideas during a first encounter. More fundamentally, they also have the potential to build deeper, long-term relationships where we will not just gain unexpected insight from an initial encounter, but a continuing stream of insights as we join together to pursue that inspiring opportunity.

There’s another, perhaps even more fundamental, way in which opportunity based narratives can help us to shape serendipity – they nurture the emotions that increase luck. Research by Richard Wiseman and other psychologists and sociologists has shown that we tend to be “luckier” if we’re not driven by anxiety or fear. These emotions tend to reduce our openness to unexpected events. Well, opportunity based narratives help us to overcome those kinds of emotions and tend to nurture optimism and hope, emotions that help us to be more open to those unexpected events.

What we need to do to shape serendipity with narratives

But the key is that we need to be willing to frame a narrative that can be a true catalyst for such serendipitous encounters. That has many challenges. We need to be willing to invite others to join us on a journey to address an opportunity that extends beyond our narrow self-interest. We need to acknowledge that we alone cannot achieve that opportunity and that we alone don’t have all the answers. We need to be willing to ask for help.

The rewards, though, could be enormous. We could achieve an opportunity that would have been well beyond our reach if we sought to pursue it on our own, an opportunity that’s likely to be even bigger as more participants join in the quest. On the way, we could build a rich network of enduring relationships with people who share our passion for the opportunity and who are committed to working together to achieve something that’s truly inspiring.

Narratives indeed have the potential to shape serendipity. But we need to harness that potential. We need to step back and reflect whether, at an individual level, we have crafted a narrative that has this potential. Most of our individual “narratives” are about us, rather than about opportunities that are bigger than us. They’re backward looking, helping us to rationalize how we got to where we are today, rather than forward looking, driven by an opportunity that’s out in the future. They’re about what we are doing to achieve even more, rather than representing a call for help and support from others in achieving an opportunity that’s meaningful to them as well.

Even if we have an individual narrative that has the potential to shape serendipity, we need to then ask if the institutions we’re part of have narratives that have that same potential. Few institutions today have that kind of narrative. We have the opportunity to evolve narratives at an institutional level that can significantly amplify the potential for serendipity.

And, let’s not stop there. Let’s also reflect on whether we are supported by narratives at a broader social level that are consistent with, and can amplify, the power to attract the kind of people that can help us to address the opportunities we’ve identified. One of the reasons I’ve stayed in Silicon Valley for decades is because I believe it has a narrative that can significantly amplify my own personal narrative.

I’ve written elsewhere about the need to ensure that narratives at multiple levels – individual, institutional and social and political – amplify and reinforce each other. That applies to the goal of shaping serendipity – we’re likely to be far luckier if we’ve aligned our narratives on these various levels. The power of attraction can be significantly undermined if there’s a divergence or inconsistency in the narratives that define our context.

Of course, lack of alignment should not be an excuse to give up. We should still seek at a minimum to craft an individual narrative that will increase our ability to shape serendipity for ourselves. All I’m suggesting is that we should consider how aligned our individual narrative is with the institutional and social and political context we find ourselves in. Where feasible, we should seek to influence these broader narratives or consider moving to other institutions or areas that have narrative more aligned with our own. We'll become even luckier if we can find ways to align narratives at multiple levels.

The bottom line

So far, I’ve been talking about the potential for narratives to shape serendipity as an opportunity. It is a significant opportunity. But, it’s not just an opportunity, it’s an imperative. In a world of exponential change, where the need is to learn faster throughout our lives, those of us who are “luckier,” those of us who can significantly increase the probability of unexpected encounters that lead to new insight and faster learning, will be the ones to truly thrive and create far more value for ourselves and for others. What will you do to shape your serendipity?

Additional material

Shaping serendipity – There’s a whole chapter in my book, The Power of Pull, which explores the potential of shaping serendipity – it’s Chapter 3: Attracting What We Need. If you’re so impatient that you can’t wait for the book to arrive, we’ve extracted some of the material on shaping serendipity in this brochure (pdf).

Stories and narratives – I’ve explored this distinction at greater length here (as well as in many subsequent Edge Perspectives blog posts).

Seeking Your Help – A Future for More Human Work

Everyone seems to be talking about the changing nature of work. The primary change dominating everyone’s attention? Automation, especially the more sophisticated automation enabled by AI and machine learning. Unfortunately, the future of work conversation today is inevitably framed as “win-lose,” a zero-sum game – worker-less factories, driverless vehicles, the end of “robot-proof” white collar jobs – with companies and workers pitted against each other. Companies win by implementing technology to cut costs and reduce headcount, and workers lose when robots and machine learning take on their jobs.

We believe this win-lose framing is misguided. As companies continue to face mounting performance pressures, the efficiency gains from automation and other technologies won’t provide adequate ongoing performance improvement. Continuing to focus primarily on doing things faster and cheaper not only leads to diminishing returns but also squanders the opportunity to redeploy human capabilities—the workforce—to focus on activities that will create new value. Yet, in a future of intense competition and rapidly changing conditions, finding ways to create new value is an imperative. And workers–with their potential for curiosity, creativity, imagination, empathy, and resourcefulness–are uniquely capable of continuously developing new ways to create new value. Far from a workerless future, we see human workers as key for success. Our hypothesis: a sustainable future of work will be a win-win, both good for the company and good for the worker, because it has the potential to create far more value in the marketplace and for the worker. I wrote about this opportunity and imperative with Cathy Engelbert here.

To be clear, though, we’re not talking about narrowly “re-skilling” workers so they can do remaining routine tasks efficiently and reliably. Nor are we talking about “augmenting” worker capability by training them how to use the data and analytics generated by artificial intelligence to do their remaining routine tasks more efficiently.

We’re talking about stepping back at a fundamental level to redefine work so that it shifts workers away from routine tasks to focus their time and effort on sustained creative problem-solving and opportunity identification in ways that deliver more and more value to their stakeholders (whether they’re customers, suppliers or internal “clients” served by support functions like IT or Human Resources). As this work gets redefined, there will be a need to draw out the broader capabilities that all humans have like curiosity, imagination and empathy, rather than focusing on narrowly defined skills.

We need your help

Unleashing this human potential to create value is going to require redefining the work that humans are doing. So, technology aside, as a first step we’re looking for a few good examples of where a company (or business unit or function) has re-defined, or is trying to re-define, the work of its organization. Specifically, we’re interested in cases where the routine, structured work of a group was deliberately reconsidered and transformed into work that taps into the creativity, curiosity, imagination and empathy of the workforce to create new value for internal or external customers. Again, we aren’t particularly concerned with whether this transformation was precipitated by new technology or not.

We’re simply looking for stories of where highly structured work was made more fluid and creative for a workforce of some scale, and ideally for operational workers rather than those typically considered “knowledge workers.” We’re also particularly looking for examples within large, traditional companies rather than start-ups or technology unicorns. Just to make it even more challenging, we'd especially like to find examples where this redefinition of work has led to tangible performance improvement in terms of value generated or impact achieved (not just doing something faster or cheaper).

Do you have any ideas for organizations we should look into? We’d love to hear them. Please reach out and let us know (you can either comment here or send me a message) – we’re anxious to start doing some deep dives to explore this emerging edge and we need your help. There’s a big opportunity out there and we want to inspire more executives to pursue it.