The Paradoxical Power of Narrative

I love paradox. Paradox is fertile ground for generating new insight and progress. As we think about what we as human beings want in our brief journey through this world, there's a core paradox that can be a challenge for all of us.

The paradox

We all want to belong. None of us want to feel excluded, none of us want to feel like we’re “outsiders.” That need to belong is ever expanding. Sure, we may feel like we belong in our family, but if we feel excluded or isolated from our local community, we’re likely to feel frustrated and alone. And, it doesn’t stop with our community; we all want to feel a part of our broader communities. There’s nothing more frustrating than feeling that our community is excluded or isolated from the countries we live in. Taking it yet one more step, no one wants to feel that their country stands alone from the rest of the world – we all want to be part of something bigger, something much bigger.

Of course, if we do feel excluded or isolated, we seek comfort in the belief that the problem is with “them,” not with “us.” We’re the victims and we need to mobilize to resist the bad folks who are excluding us. We become prey to an “us vs. them” view of the world. That view may help us to cope with our perceived reality, but it doesn’t reduce our unmet need to belong to something bigger.

So, we all want to belong. But here’s the paradox: at the same time we all want to be different. We all sense that we’re unique human beings with a distinctive set of capabilities and feel great frustration if we’re lumped together with everyone else in a nameless mass where everyone is viewed as exactly the same. We don’t want to be a cog in a machine or an anonymous face in the crowd. We want to be recognized and celebrated for who we are and for what makes us different. We want to stand out and not be part of the crowd.

And we don’t want to just be different, we want to make a difference. We want to contribute to the broader community that we are a part of in a way that is unique to us. We want people to look back and say that we did something meaningful that reflected our unique capabilities. Again, we don’t just want to be a cog in a machine, doing something that anyone could do.

There you have it. Isn’t this a wonderful paradox? We all want to belong, but we all want to be different. I can just hear the rationalists among us getting frustrated and saying “you’ve got to choose. You can either belong or you can be different but you can’t do both.”

Resolving the paradox

Well, yes, you can do both. In fact, you need to do both. Here’s the thing. We live in a world that's more and more rapidly changing and where we all experience mounting performance pressure, as individuals and as groups. I call it The Big Shift.

In that kind of world, you can’t just stand still. You need to be accelerating improvement of your performance. And you can’t stand alone. No matter how smart and accomplished you are, you'll get better faster as part of a broader group, a group that will challenge you to get better but also be there to support you when you confront the inevitable frustrations and failures that can be discouraging. So, you need to belong, and the larger the community you belong to, the more you'll be able to tap into the network effects and increasing returns that will help you to get better faster (although the most powerful way to learn faster as part of a larger and larger group is to adopt the cellular structure of "creation spaces", but that's a whole other topic). You need to belong to get better faster.

It’s not just you who needs to get better faster. Communities need to get better faster as well. And the best way for them to get better faster is to cultivate diversity. Rather than trying to get everyone to fit the same mold, they need to embrace cultures that encourage everyone to be unique and contribute unique perspectives and capabilities to the performance challenges they are facing. There’s more and more evidence that diversity helps larger groups achieve more creative outcomes and improve performance. So, the best way to belong and to make a contribution is to be different.

Now, admittedly this is a big shift from where we are today. We’re segmenting into communities that value conformity. If you want to be a part of the community, you need to learn how to “fit in.” At one level, this is understandable – we have a natural human tendency when we experience pressure to connect with others like us. But that’s not what's going to help us to move from a defensive mindset to an opportunity-driven mindset.

The role of narrative

So, how do we get from here to there? Well, this is where I think narrative can play a powerful role. As many of you know, I’ve written extensively about a concept of narrative that’s very different from the way it’s used in most discussions today. For those who haven’t been following this, I gave an opening salvo almost seven years ago here and I have more than 14 other posts here at Edge Perspectives exploring various dimensions of narrative the way I define it and why I believe it has so much power.

In brief, I believe narratives are open-ended, there is no resolution – there’s some kind of significant opportunity or threat out in the future and it’s not at all clear whether or not it will be achieved. The resolution of the narrative hinges on those it is addressed to – it’s a call to action that says that each of you can make a difference, each of you needs to make a difference, without you, this will not be achieved. For reasons that I’ve developed elsewhere, I believe that opportunity based narratives (rather than threat based narratives) have the greatest ability to help us achieve more of our potential.

Opportunity narratives have the ability to bring us together by emphasizing that any of us individually will not be able to address the full opportunity that lies ahead. If we’re inspired by the opportunity, we begin to feel a connection to others who are also inspired by this same opportunity and we’re motivated to build on that connection to find ways to come together and collaborate in our efforts to address the opportunity. As we work together, we develop deep, trust-based relationships with others since we're all motivated by the same opportunity. We feel more and more connected with those who share our commitment.

The most powerful opportunity narratives are those that frame an opportunity that’s really big and that requires the collaboration of many across the globe. Opportunity narratives can help to coalesce local communities, regions and even countries, but some opportunities span beyond national borders and require collaboration of a growing number of people everywhere.

The challenge with opportunity narratives is to strike an effective balance between specificity and openness. On the one hand, the opportunity needs to be tangible enough to be credible and inspiring. If it’s too vague, it’s hard to motivate people and support effective collaboration. Even if you can motivate people, you run the growing risk of fragmentation as everyone begins to develop a different view of what the opportunity really is.

On the other hand, if it’s a really big opportunity, it needs to be open enough to invite lots of local initiatives that can begin to try new approaches and learn what's most effective in targeting the opportunity. The ultimate power of these kinds of narratives is that they invite experimentation and exploration to discover how to achieve better and better results. And, most importantly, they provide space for each of us to express our unique individuality and perspectives so that we can unleash the diversity that will help us to learn faster together and accelerate performance improvement.

In this way, opportunity based narratives embrace the paradox that I introduced above. We all have a desire to belong but we also have a desire to make a unique difference. These narratives create a context to cultivate a sense of belonging but they also call on us to make a unique difference.

So, what are examples of these kinds of expansive opportunity narratives? We actually have very few today – that’s one of the reasons that we’re seeing more and more evidence of fragmentation and conformity as we fall prey to threat-based narratives that focus on enemies that are threatening our way of life and our well-being. We certainly have opportunity based narratives around aspirations like space travel or curing disease but these are narrowly focused in terms of who can actively participate (other than perhaps contributing some money to those who are participating).

What’s an opportunity based narrative that can invite active participation from more and more people around the world? I don’t have an answer – yet – and I would welcome help in thinking about what such a narrative might look like. My instinct is that it has something to do with fostering communities (both physical and virtual) that will help all of us to cultivate our unique individuality and bring us together in ways that will make it possible for us to achieve more and more of our unique potential.

Bottom line

The best way to belong is to make a contribution. The best way to make a contribution is to belong. Narratives can help us to achieve both.

Resolve To Do Your New Year’s Resolutions Differently

Have you made your New Year’s resolutions yet? Be careful.

For many, these resolutions are at risk of becoming a sorry joke. The cynics say that these are useless exercises that make us feel good for a few months, but that no one really has the intention or fortitude to follow them beyond that. We've all heard the statistics about how gym memberships spike early in the New Year but that the crowds quickly thin out and the gym is empty again by the end of February.

Does it have to be this way? As an optimist, I believe that the New Year can be a powerful time for reflection and commitment to achieving more in the year ahead.

But, in my experience, that’s exactly the problem: few of us really use this time to reflect on our life’s journey and what we really want to accomplish. Instead, the resolutions tend to be a random and ad hoc collection of “wishes” that come to us top of mind when we realize that resolutions are expected at this time of year. It shouldn’t be a surprise that few of us have the determination to follow through on these resolutions, especially given the increasing number of distractions we encounter on a daily basis.

There’s a better way. We might all benefit by using an approach that I’ve written about in the context of business strategy, but that I’ve found can be very powerful for us as individuals. The approach that I call “zoom out, zoom in” can be very useful because it requires us to step back and reflect on where we want to go and what steps we can take today to accelerate our movement towards that destination.

Zoom out

This approach starts by challenging us to pull out of the day to day activities that tend to consume us. It urges us to “zoom out” to a ten to twenty year horizon. On that horizon, we’re asked to reflect on what the world might look like that far out into the future. That’s a challenge, I know, given how rapidly the world is changing, but it becomes a catalyst to step back and reflect on what the long-term forces are that are re-shaping the world we live in and what kind of world those forces are likely to produce.

That exercise provides us with the context for reflecting on what we would most like to accomplish in that world ten to twenty years from now. For some of us, it may truly be some kind of world changing impact like solving climate change challenges or extending human longevity. But for most of us, our aspirations may be a little closer to home, like becoming a coach to others who are overwhelmed by mounting performance pressure or developing a craft skill like woodwork or weaving that will delight others with products that are unique and highly creative.

The key is to look inside and identify where and how we can achieve much more of our potential, given the world that we are likely to be living in ten to twenty years from now. Without a clear view of the context that we’re likely to be living in, it’s hard to know where and how to pursue the passion that we have discovered within ourselves.

I’ve written a lot about the passion of the explorer here and here, but as passionate explorers our commitment to achieve an increasing impact in whatever domain we’ve chosen would surely benefit from a better sense of how that domain is likely to evolve. And that’s not to say that one should take the future as a given. Part of the reflection process is to think about how the world is likely to evolve given the forces at work and then to ask if you might be able and willing to try to materially alter that future. Don’t fall into the trap of passively viewing the future as a given – we all have the potential to re-shape that future if we have enough conviction and the ability to mobilize others.

I hasten to add, too, that this zoom out view isn’t a detailed blueprint of the future. It will necessarily be high level, given all the uncertainty that exists, but with enough specificity to help us make key choices and decisions in the short-term. It will also be determined by the focus that our particular passion of the explorer gives us. For example, if our passion is to become a coach who will help people become more effective participants in their community, it would certainly help to have some view of how communities are likely to evolve and what the needs of communities might be ten to twenty years from now.

Zoom in

As we begin to get more clarity on who we want to become in the future, this can then help us to zoom in to a very different time horizon – six to twelve months. On this horizon, the key question to ask is: what are the two or three initiatives that I could pursue over the next six to twelve months that would have the greatest potential to accelerate my movement towards the longer-term opportunity that I’ve identified for myself. Then, we need to ask: am I allocating enough resources (especially time) to these two or three initiatives in the next six to twelve months to achieve the progress that I aspire to achieve? Finally, we need to ask: how would I measure progress at the end of six to twelve months so that I could reflect on, and learn from, the experience and achieve even more impact in the following year?

Now, we have a framework to craft the two or three resolutions (no more) that could really help us to achieve a lot more in the year ahead. Rather than random and ad hoc, these resolutions are now grounded in a much clearer view of where we want to go and what kind of impact we are trying to achieve. We can be inspired by that longer-term opportunity and understand that there are ways we begin to achieve that opportunity starting tomorrow (or even today). It can begin to give us conviction that these resolutions really matter – they are key to helping us achieve far more of our potential.

Finding your passion

But, wait a minute, I can hear some of you saying, what if I don’t have a passion? What if I don’t know what kind of impact I want to achieve ten to twenty years from now? What do I do then?

Well, not to worry. Many of us haven’t yet found our passion. As I’ve suggested elsewhere, that’s not because many of us aren’t capable of discovering and nurturing our passion of the explorer. Far from it – we all have a passion of the explorer deep within us that is waiting to be discovered and drawn out.

The reason many of us haven’t yet found our passion of the explorer is at least in part because we’ve grown up within a set of institutions, starting with our schools, that are determined to discourage us from finding a passion. Our institutions are built on a model of scalable efficiency that wants us to follow instructions predictably and reliably. In these institutions, the passion of the explorer is deeply suspect. The only kind of passion that is encouraged in these institutions is the willingness to work nights and weekends on our assigned tasks – that’s not the passion of the explorer.

While it’s understandable that many of us haven’t yet discovered our passion of the explorer, we all need to find this passion, because it’s precisely this kind of passion that will be key to success in a world of mounting performance pressure. Those of us who don’t find and cultivate this passion will experience growing stress and ultimately burn out and drop out.

So, if you haven’t yet found your passion of the explorer, use this time of year to zoom in and craft a set of two to three resolutions that will have the greatest potential to help you discover the passion that’s patiently waiting to be discovered. Typically, these resolutions will involve taking you out of your comfort zone and exposing you to a broader range of experiences that will increase your chances of encountering that passion within you. Don’t give up and don’t get stuck in a rut – expand your horizons and search for that passion.

For those of you who haven’t yet discovered your passion of the explorer, your zoom out will be to imagine what your life could be like ten to twenty years from now once you have discovered that passion and had an opportunity to pursue it. The zoom in will be entirely focused on pursuing initiatives that will increase your likelihood of finding that passion.

Crafting your narrative

For those of you who have been following me for a while, you might begin to see the connection with the need for a compelling personal narrative that I’ve discussed here and here. If you’ve zoomed out and identified an inspirational opportunity to achieve impact out in the future and if you’ve zoomed in and identified a small set of near-term initiatives that can help you achieve that opportunity, you now have the basis for a call to action to others.

You see, this is another problem that we typically have when we set out to frame a set of New Year’s resolutions. They tend to all be about me. But here’s the thing – anything worth achieving is likely to be helped by the participation of others. That requires a call to action to others, not just yourself.

As I’ve discussed elsewhere, a narrative the way I define it is not yet resolved – there’s some kind of significant opportunity or threat out on the horizon and it’s not clear whether it will ever be achieved or not because there are some significant obstacles and challenges along the way. And the resolution of the narrative hinges on a call to action to others – their choices and their actions will help to determine how this narrative resolves.

So, when you’re framing your New Year’s resolutions, don’t just make them about you. Think of others who might have similar aspirations in terms of the zoom out opportunity and frame your resolutions as a call to action not just for you but for others who could help you in achieving even more impact by coming together. Share these resolutions with others and explicitly ask for their help. You might be surprised at how much more progress you could make by coming together in the year ahead rather than just trying to do it all yourself. And, if others have joined you on your journey, it can provide you with the reinforcement you need to stay the course.

Bottom line

Don’t give up. That’s the last thing you want to do in a world of expanding opportunity and mounting pressure is to give up. You have so much potential that is waiting, and yearning, to be achieved. But use this time of year to shift how you frame your New Year’s resolutions. If you want to achieve lasting impact with your New Year’s resolutions, put them into context – both long-term and short-term. That context will help to provide both the inspiration and conviction to pursue the resolutions. Also, invite others to join you on the journey. Together, you will be able to support and challenge each other in ways that help you to achieve much more of your potential. Remember: small moves, smartly made, can set big things in motion.

Go Beyond the Christmas Stories to Find the Christmas Narrative

As we gather with family and friends to celebrate Christmas, this might be a good opportunity to reflect on why Christmas has become such a global holiday, with a growing number of participants each year, extending far beyond the Christian communities that would naturally celebrate Christmas.

While the cynics among us would assert that it’s all a conspiracy by retailers to get us to spend more money, I suspect there’s a deeper reason for the spread of Christmas that deserves to be explored.

The stories of Christmas

Many would cite the stories of Christmas as a key driver of its popularity. Certainly for Christians, Christmas has particular significance as marking the arrival of Jesus Christ. It’s a wonderful story about the search for a place to give birth (dare I say, by immigrants?) and the beginning of an inspiring life.

For others, there are the stories of Santa Claus, working with his elves in the North Pole to prepare gifts that will be miraculously brought to us in the middle of the night on a sleigh with flying reindeer. Those of us who are historically minded might be inspired by the generosity of St. Nicholas back in fourth century Greece, who became the inspiration for our Santa Claus stories. Hollywood has contributed to the Christmas story portfolio with movies like “It’s a Wonderful Life” and “A Christmas Story”, among many others.

Distinguishing between stories and narratives

As wonderful as all these stories are, I’m moved to dig even deeper. For those of you familiar with my exploration of the distinction between stories and narratives, you might guess where I’m headed.
Yes, I think there’s something more. Beyond all those inspiring stories, there’s a deeper narrative that I think gives those stories meaning and emotional power.

For those who haven’t seen my earlier writings on stories and narratives, I draw a distinction between the two, even though most of us view the terms as synonymous. For me, stories are self-contained – there’s a beginning, a middle and an end. Stories are also about me, the storyteller, or other people – they’re not about you, although you might use your imagination to explore what you would have done in the same situation. In contrast, for me, narratives are open-ended – there is no resolution, yet. There’s some significant threat or opportunity out in the future and it’s not at all clear whether it will come to pass.

Most importantly, the resolution of the narrative ultimately depends upon you – it’s a call to action to say that your choices and actions will help to resolve the narrative.

The spread of threat based narratives

So, back to Christmas. We live in a world of mounting performance pressure, driven by the forces of the Big Shift that are playing out globally. In this kind of world, the natural human reaction is fear. Faced with fear, there’s a tendency for threat based narratives to take hold because they feed on the fear that we feel.

Certainly, in the US, our political environment is increasingly dominated by threat based narratives on both sides of the aisle – we’re under attack, the enemy is coming after us and we need to mobilize quickly to stay alive. The nature of the enemy differs depending on which side of the aisle you sit, but both sides have become consumed by the imminent threat. These threat based narratives are unfortunately not just restricted to the US, they’re becoming increasingly prevalent around the world.

And the threat based narratives are fed every day by our mass media. Mass media is in a growing battle for our attention and they long ago came to realize that stories about disasters and danger grab attention far more effectively than “good news” stories. If you listen to our mass media, you can’t be blamed for thinking that our world is quickly approaching a disastrous end.

Here’s the problem: threat based narratives feed on fear and promote highly dysfunctional behavior – they increase our perception of risk, they shorten time horizons, they promote “win, lose” views of the world and they erode trust.

But here’s the good news. I believe that, while many of us may feel fear and become vulnerable to threat based narratives, we all have a hunger for a sense of opportunity and for an ability to achieve more of our potential as human beings.

The religious narrative

That’s why I believe Christmas has such a hold on a growing number of people. Behind all the stories that we hear at Christmas time, there’s a deeper and more inspiring narrative that’s a call to action, telling us that we can and should act in ways that will create growing opportunity.

Certainly, in the Christian faith there’s a powerful narrative telling us that Christ brought an opportunity for all of us to achieve salvation. But salvation is not guaranteed, it requires us to act, to accept Christ as our Savior and to live our lives in honorable ways. It’s an opportunity available to all of us, but we need to act if we are to achieve the opportunity.

The secular narrative

But, what about the non-Christians among us? In Christmas, a broader narrative has emerged that can and does speak to everyone. That broader narrative has two different dimensions.

If you’re a child or someone living in poverty, it’s a call to do the right thing and offers the promise of rewards if you are good. But you need to act, those rewards will only come to you if you act in the right way.

If you’re a more fortunate person, a person of even modest means, the Christmas narrative is a call to action for you as well. It says that there’s an opportunity for you to express gratitude to family and friends who have shared their lives with you. It also encourages you to reach out and express generosity to those who are less fortunate in the form of charitable giving. It says that you have an opportunity to make the lives of others happier and brighter, but it requires action, it requires reaching out and expressing gratitude and generosity in the tangible form of gifts.

What’s the greatest gift we can offer? It’s acknowledgement. We all crave acknowledgement and recognition for the good things we’ve done.

And it’s not just about Christmas. It’s a reminder that this opportunity exists throughout the year. That’s one of the reasons that the movie “It’s a Wonderful Life” became such a Christmas classic. An angel is sent to show the hero of the film, who had become very frightened and depressed, that throughout his life he had a positive impact on so many people, something he had not fully understood or appreciated. This impact on the lives of others wasn’t just at Christmas; it was every day of the year.

Come together

There’s an even deeper call to action in the Christmas narrative. It urges us to come together because together we can achieve far more impact not only in bettering our own lives, but in bettering the lives of all of us. That’s why Christmas is not about being alone – it’s about finding people you love and reinforcing with each other the opportunity that we all have to make each other’s lives better and, in the process, making our own lives better.

It’s all about opportunity, but it’s also about the recognition that, as human beings, we all have flaws that may lead us astray. While there’s a call to action for us as individuals, it’s a call to action for us as a society. The more we come together, the more we will each be able to stay true to our calling and achieve more of our potential.

The opportunity ahead

How often do you hear that during the rest of the year? It’s why Christmas has a growing pull on all of us. It’s an opportunity we’re all inspired by. It’s such a relief in a world that’s increasingly consumed by threat based narratives.It's one of the reasons that all the Christmas stories have such meaning to us – they are connected to a much more fundamental narrative that speaks deeply to all of us.

Now, here’s a radical idea: what if we embraced this opportunity based narrative throughout the year rather than just reserving it for the few days around Christmas? Can you imagine the kind of world we might build then? We might move from a world driven by growing fear to a world of expanding hope about the endless possibilities ahead of us. But it's certainly not going to happen on its own – it requires action. Are you willing to act? Are you wiling to embrace this narrative throughout the year?

The Hidden Dimension of the Learning Pyramid

My learning pyramid has been challenged! My recent post on the learning pyramid received some great coverage, but a number of you reached out to challenge me: is it really a pyramid or just a triangle?

In fact, I had intended to follow up with a second blog post explaining why my learning pyramid is actually a pyramid and not just a triangle. You see, there’s a third dimension that I haven’t yet shared, but that’s critical to learning.

People as the missing dimension

What is that third dimension? Well, of course, it’s people, lots of people – in fact, the more, the better. You see, most of us are trapped in a view of learning as an individual endeavor. It’s you, off in a corner, reading a book.

Of course, some learning can occur in isolation but, if we’re really serious about learning more and learning faster, then we need to break out of that isolation. And, in the Big Shift we’re going through, we all had better be very serious about learning more and learning faster – together.

Coming together in creation spaces

So, what am I talking about? Going into larger and larger classrooms where we can all learn together? Far from it. I’m talking about something that I’ve called creation spaces, which I believe are the most powerful platform for learning.

The basic unit of a creation space is a cell, a small group of people, typically somewhere between 3 to 15 people, who come together on a very frequent basis and share a common goal to have an increasing impact in some domain. That domain could be anything from surfing really big and gnarly waves to repairing airplanes or helping unemployed people in a local community to find gainful employment. As they work together in their cells to pursue that goal, the shared commitment of the participants to have increasing impact helps them to build deep, trust-based relationships with each other. This makes it possible for each participant to ask for help from others as they each struggle to get better faster.

The ultimate power of a creation space is that it scales by connecting these small groups into an ever expanding network of other small groups where participants can reach out and learn from the experiences of other groups in the network, through shared platforms like conferences, online discussion forums and knowledge archives. Ultimately, these networks can include hundreds of thousands, even millions of participants – there’s no limit to the scaling potential.

To be clear, these creation spaces don't have to be formal organizations. In the case of big wave surfing, the local cells are the small groups of surfers that gather on a regular basis at a local surf break and work with each other to get better faster. They connect with other cells through surfing competitions, online video repositories and online communities of interest.

The interesting thing about these cells is that they embody all of the levels I identified in the knowledge pyramid – skills, knowledge, capabilities and passion. To achieve increasing impact in their domain, they must be constantly evolving their skills, based on deeper knowledge of relevant and evolving contexts, enabled by richer capabilities and driven by growing passion.

While each of us needs to be developing and deepening our learning pyramid, we’ll all learn faster if we’re coming together around shared learning objectives. We each bring different experiences and perspectives to the context we’re in (diversity is a key factor in enhancing the impact of a cell), which can lead to better and more insightful questions to drive our learning. Even more importantly, the deep trust-based relationships that emerge in these cells help the participants to challenge each other to come up with better and better approaches, while at the same time providing support and encouragement when they confront unexpected challenges.

These cells are powerful learning engines when they’re driven by a shared commitment to increasing impact. The participants in these cells are not just there to learn about something in the abstract; they’re driven by the desire to have increasing impact in the world around them. It’s exactly that commitment that makes the learning so effective – participants are constantly seeking to apply that knowledge and learning through action how to have more and more impact.

The most powerful form of learning is through action. That’s exactly why classrooms are less and less relevant to learning, especially if you’re just sitting there passively listening to a teacher, taking good notes and then memorizing the information you need to pass the exam. That may help you with acquiring some new knowledge, but it’s not the knowledge that will be most helpful in achieving more impact in the world around you.

In a previous post, I suggested that the best way to measure our net worth is through our network of relationships. In that post, I emphasized that this is not about how many “connections” we have, but rather the number and diversity of the deep, trust-based relationships we have with others. While some of these relationships will consist of family and close personal friends, a key question we should ask ourselves is whether we’ve been able to find and participate in a creation space through a cell where we have developed deep relationships that will help us to learn faster.

Coming together in cities

So, creation spaces are a key vehicle to accelerate learning. But there’s more. I’ve written before about the increasing importance of cities in our global economy. The paradox is that, in a world that’s increasingly flat where location appears to no longer matter, we’re accelerating our movement globally in larger and larger cities. Why would we do that if location no longer matters?

There are many reasons, but one key reason is that we all have an instinctive belief that we’re going to learn faster in cities than we ever could in rural areas or smaller towns and villages. Much of that learning comes through serendipity, those unexpected encounters with people that we would have never thought to look for, often from very different backgrounds, but who end up offering us some really valuable ideas about an issue or problem we’re wrestling with.

In fact, serendipity offers an important balance to those tightly knit cells I discussed earlier. It exposes us to very different perspectives and approaches that can lead us to major new insights and questions to explore. As I’ve written in The Power of Pull, we all have an untapped potential to shape serendipity – to significantly increase the probability of those unexpected encounters – through a wide range of choices we make in our lives. Serendipity is a key driver of learning.

The increasing returns effect – learning faster together

Both creation spaces and cities make it essential to focus on that third dimension of the learning pyramid – how many people are we connecting with as we pursue our learning journey? Trust me, no matter how smart and motivated you are, you’re going to learn a lot faster when you are with others.

In fact, I believe there’s a powerful increasing returns effect in learning – the more people we interact with on our journey, the more rapidly we will learn. The deeper we can make that third dimension of the pyramid – the more people we can connect with on our learning journey – the more robust and powerful that learning pyramid will become. Without that depth, the pyramid will indeed remain very weak and fragile.

The power of passion

By the way, this is one reason that I put such emphasis on the importance of the passion of the explorer at the base of the learning pyramid – it turns out that one of the key attributes of the passion of the explorer is what I call a “connecting disposition.” That connecting disposition is an urge to reach out and connect with others as we confront new challenges, rather than sitting alone in a room to try to figure it out by ourselves. It turns out, based on some research that we did, passionate explorers are twice as connected as people who do not yet have this form of passion. That’s one of the reasons that this form of passion is such a key driver of learning.

It’s also the reason why I put such emphasis on finding and cultivating passion as the foundation for the learning pyramid. Without this passion, we’ll be much less effective in building out the base of the pyramid in terms of the number of people we connect with on our learning journey.

And, please, don’t interpret me as saying that if you haven’t yet found your passion, you can’t learn. Of course you can. The best place to start is by cultivating the capabilities I identified in the second level of the pyramid, especially curiosity and emotional and social intelligence. Those capabilities will help you to explore an expanding array of domains until you finally find the domain that draws out your passion.

But, please don’t stop exploring until you’ve connected with that passion. I believe we all have that potential for passion. Just because some of us discover it earlier in our lives, doesn’t mean that it’s absent from the rest of us – others just haven’t been fortunate enough to find it yet, in part because many have given up looking for it.

The deeper meaning of pyramids

Before I finish, let me also point out that the choice of the image of a pyramid has deeper meaning. The earliest pyramids were actually the ziggurats built by the Mesopotamians, starting in the third millennium BC. These structures were believed to be dwelling places for the gods. Later, the Egyptians became famous for their pyramids and the inspiration for the earliest Egyptian pyramid was the desire to build a gigantic stairway so that the soul of the deceased pharaoh could ascend to the heavens.

What better way of thinking about a learning pyramid? Without becoming narrowly religious about it, the learning pyramid can become our stairway to achieve much more of our potential and achieve things that we might have thought to be only the province of gods. Let’s ascend together to the heavens that await us.

Bottom line

In a world of mounting performance pressure, we all need to expand our view of learning. It has many levels to it, but to make sure we are making progress on all the levels, we need to find others to help us and work with us on our journey. By joining together, we’ll reach heights that we would never have imagined possible. And we will turn the stress of mounting pressure into the excitement of expanding opportunity.

Never Under-Estimate the Immune System

Every large and successful institution has an immune system – a collection of individuals who are prepared to mobilize at the slightest sign of any “outside” ideas or people in order to ensure that these foreign bodies are neutralized and that the existing institution survives intact and can continue on course. Just like the immune system all organisms have, this institutional immune system is adept at recognizing foreign bodies as soon as they appear and very effective at protecting the institution from infection. It is in fact what has helped large institutions to survive – they are in fact “built to last.”

But here’s the paradox: the immune system that has given large institutions extraordinary resilience in the past may be the very thing that makes these institutions so vulnerable today. In more stable times, institutional immune systems are very effective at keeping institutions focused and on course, resistant to the distractions that might lead to their downfall. In more rapidly changing and volatile signs, this same immune system can become deadly by resisting the very changes that are required for the survival of the institution.

I've been writing about the Big Shift for quite a while now. Long-term forces that have been playing out for decades on a global scale are leading to a profound shift in how institutions will need to operate in order to survive, much less thrive, in the decades ahead.

I hesitate to use the word transformation, because it is so over-used today, and loosely used to mean any kind of change. For me, transformation is about re-thinking everything, starting with the rationale for having an institution to begin with and leading to a re-design of all aspects of the institution – organization, operations, performance metrics, talent needs and infrastructure requirements – to support the new rationale.

The Big Shift requires precisely this form of transformation in all of our institutions – corporations, government bodies, schools, and NGO’s. And that’s exactly what the immune system mobilizes to resist. It’s the biggest challenge that any serious transformation initiative will confront.

I’ve been involved in large scale transformation efforts for decades now and there’s only one lesson that I really have to share from all that experience: never, ever under-estimate the power of the immune system of a large existing institution. I’ve developed an enormous respect for the incredible power of the institutional immune system. It’s the reason why a growing body of academic studies have shown that institutional transformation efforts (in the way I have defined them) have an extraordinarily high failure rate. It’s the biggest reason why so many large and successful incumbents in the business world have been toppled when faced with the threat of disruption.

So, what is to be done? Well, one option is to pursue something called a "transformation" initiative that really isn't. So many of the "digital transformation" programs companies are pursuing today are really just using digital technology to do what they have always done faster, cheaper and more conveniently. That's not transformation and, as long as you don't take too many people or resources, the immune system is unlikely to mobilize.

What's the alternative? Do we just sit back and wait for the impending death of all of our existing institutions? Of course not. But we need to craft approaches to transformation that have the ability to respect the power of the immune system and find ways to minimize the risk that the immune system will mobilize to crush the transformation effort.

And let me be clear. The immune system is not driven by evil people. The people who are part of the immune system are extremely well intentioned – their overwhelming desire is to contribute to the success of their institutions. That’s why they are fighting so hard and so determined to crush the foreign bodies.

So, here are some lessons I’ve learned that can help minimize, but probably not eliminate, the resistance of the immune system.

Position appropriately

In driving transformation, there’s often a tendency to focus on the impending threat – for example, we’re all going to die if we don’t transform now. In my experience, that threat-based approach to transformation actually increases the resistance of the immune system. If we’re under imminent threat, the immune system reasons that it’s even more urgent to protect the institution and it becomes even more determined to resist anything that might distract it from the tried and true approaches that have led to the success of the institution so far.

Instead, position the initiative as addressing an opportunity, something that will help the institution to have even greater impact in its relevant market or constituency.

At the same time, don’t go overboard. Don’t try to raise expectations within the institutional leadership too high too early. Even though the opportunity has the potential to create value and impact that far exceeds what the institution is delivering today, resist the temptation to focus on the magnitude of the opportunity early in the initiative. The bigger the opportunity, the more skepticism you’ll encounter from the immune systems, especially if it’s a very different opportunity from the one that the institution is pursuing today. And the bigger the opportunity, the more likely resistance will surface because there will be a fear that it will draw on the resources that are badly needed to keep the ship moving in its current direction.

Find the right sponsor

In my experience, to succeed in a transformation initiative, you’ll need one sponsor who is ideally the leader of the institution or at least someone who reports to the leader. Make sure that person understands what you are trying to do and what will be required to drive the transformation. The key is to find someone who has both the conviction and the courage required to support and protect you. Don’t try to get support from the entire leadership team – I’ve never seen that happen and it tends to draw out the immune system.

Pick an edge

Rather than trying to drive the transformation within the core of the existing institution, find an edge that today represents very modest activity but that, based on an understanding of the exponential forces that are re-shaping your relevant markets or arenas, has the potential to scale extremely rapidly and ultimately become the new core of your institution. The key is move on the side and build something new, rather than trying to challenge those within the core to change.

Find an edge that will require a fundamentally different approach to the business from the one embedded in the core. Use the edge to drive home that everything will need to be challenged and a different mindset, culture and practices deployed to address the edge opportunity. The edge becomes the transformation engine and not just another growth or diversification engine.

And, choose only one edge. Scaling an edge to become the new core is really challenging under the best of circumstances. Don’t try to launch a lot of edge initiatives – pick the one that appears to have the most promise and devote all your effort to making that edge initiative successful. The zoom out/zoom in approach to strategy that I have discussed elsewhere can be very helpful in identifying the most promising edge based on a 10-20 year view of relevant markets or arenas.

Minimize resource requirements

The more resources you need to launch and drive the edge initiative in its early stages, the more vulnerable you’ll be to exciting the immune system. In fact, this is a key filter for choosing the right edge to scale. Pick an edge that requires modest resources in the early stages.

Also, wherever possible reduce dependency on the core institution for resources like IT infrastructure or existing customer relationships. The more dependent you are on core institution resources, the more power the immune system will have to either deny access to those resources or impose conditions that will undermine the success of your edge initiative.

Do whatever you can to leverage your own modest resources with resources from third parties.

Show results as quickly as possible

Nothing will help to weaken the immune system more than tangible impact from the transformation initiative. The sooner you can point to actual impact in the marketplace or arena, the more successful you will be in overcoming skepticism and the more support you are likely to garner for continuing and scaling the effort. Focus on operating metrics that tend to be leading indicators of performance and that can be measured quickly, rather than financial metrics that tend to be lagging indicators of performance.

But wherever possible, avoid impact that involves cannibalizing the core – don’t take revenue or profits from the core. That will mobilize the immune system very quickly.

Scale as rapidly as possible

Don’t be complacent. Growth alone is not sufficient to drive transformation. The key is accelerating growth – success ultimately depends on exponential growth.

Be relentless in monitoring key metrics and constantly reflecting on how to achieve higher and higher growth rates. Growth and scale is ultimately the best defense against the immune system. The smaller you are, the more vulnerable you are.

As you grow, be alert to the potential to draw more and more people from the core of the institution into the edge as they begin to see the impact that is being achieved and want to become a part of this rapidly scaling part of the organization. The more converts you can mobilize and embed in your effort, the more open the remaining participants in the immune system will become to overcoming their skepticism and ultimately joining this highly successful effort.

Bottom line

True transformation is an imperative for all institutions in the Big Shift, but extremely challenging because of the enormous power of the immune system. The best way to address the challenge of the immune system is not to confront it, but to go around it. Don’t try to transform the core of the institution, but instead find an edge that can scale rapidly to the point where it becomes the new core of the institution. There’s a lot more information here about how to scale the edge as a way to drive transformation.

Here’s the good news, if you transform in the right direction, moving from a model of scalable efficiency to a model of scalable learning, the new core that you’re building will not be victim to an immune system of its own. Rather than resisting change, the new core will constantly seek out change because it will recognize that change is the key driver of learning and performance improvement.

And, here’s the best news of all: in a world that’s increasingly shaped by exponential change, it’s possibly to scale edges far more rapidly and with far less resources than could ever have been imagined a few decades ago. Small moves, smartly made, can indeed set very big things in motion.

Mastering the Learning Pyramid

Our media and conversations are consumed by the future of work, which tends to quickly reduce to concerns over the spread of AI and what it will mean for jobs. I’ve noticed that the discussion quickly turns to what skills we will need to continue to be employable in the future, especially when the participants have children who are trying to prepare themselves for the world ahead.

The static world of skills

We’re focusing on the wrong thing. Focusing on skills betrays a static view of the world. The assumption is that if we acquire certain skills, we will be protected from the onslaught of the robots and the rapidly changing world around us. It ignores the fact that the average half-life of a skill is now about five years and continuing to shrink.

It’s precisely that static view of the world that is our biggest barrier. We need to find ways to prepare ourselves for a world where learning is a lifetime endeavor. The question then becomes: what will help us to learn faster so that we can quickly acquire whatever skills are required in the moment?

The learning pyramid

In that context, we would all benefit by expanding our horizons and exploring the learning pyramid outlined below that can ultimately become the key to sustained and accelerated learning for all of us. Skills are at the top of the pyramid – they are ultimately what helps us to achieve impact and create value in a specific context.

Putting knowledge into context

But, let’s dig a bit deeper. Skills are about “knowing how.” Knowledge – the second level of the learning pyramid – is about “knowing what.” Our schools tend to focus on broad-based knowledge like history, economics and science that give us a context for understanding the world we live in, but the knowledge here tends to be reduced to facts and figures that can be recited on a test – it truly is about “knowing what” rather than “knowing why.”

Even at this level, though, the knowledge is largely about the broader context that we all live in – it's rarely about the narrower contexts that we confront on a daily basis – our families, our circle of friends or our local community. It turns out that success in our lives will ultimately hinge on our ability to deeply “read” these narrower contexts to quickly understand the key elements and dynamics that shape them.

In part, this is because skills are inevitably context specific – they involve knowing how to act in a given context. In a world that has been driven by increasing standardization, there's often been a tendency to underplay this aspect of skills, especially in the business world. We're supposed to believe that our skills can be applied in the same standard way across most, if not all, contexts.

Capabilities that drive learning

That leads to the third level of the learning pyramid – capabilities. Supporting the development of skills and a deeper understanding of our contexts are more fundamental capabilities. These capabilities can take many different forms but, in my mind, the core capabilities are curiosity, imagination, creativity, critical thinking and social and emotional intelligence. If we cultivate these capabilities, we'll be able to quickly understand the evolving contexts we live in and acquire the skills that will help us to operate successfully in very specific contexts.

It can get confusing because many people refer to these capabilities as skills, sometimes calling them “enduring skills” or “basic skills.” I believe it's helpful to draw a sharper distinction between skills that are very context specific and tend to evolve at a rapid rate versus the capabilities that will help us to quickly and effectively “read” our contexts and develop the skills that are most appropriate for that context. Skills grow obsolete at an accelerating rate while our capabilities not only endure, they help us to more quickly acquire the knowledge and skills we will need to be successful.

Passion as the foundation of learning

But, wait, there’s more. What will help us to cultivate and deepen those capabilities over time? I would suggest that there’s an even more fundamental level supporting the learning pyramid, one that often gets ignored, but that ultimately is essential if we are serious about learning faster over time.

The foundation of the learning pyramid needs to be passion. It’s a very specific form of passion that we have identified in our work at the Center for the Edge – the passion of the explorer – that I've written about here, here and here. This form of passion has three components – (1) a long-term commitment to achieving an increasing impact in a particular domain, (2) a questing disposition that seeks out and is excited by new challenges and (3) a connecting disposition that actively seeks to connect with others who might be helpful in addressing these new challenges.

People who have this form of passion are driven to cultivate the capabilities that will help them to learn faster and acquire whatever knowledge and skills are required to succeed in their chosen domain. Sure, without this passion, we might still develop some of the capabilities required to learn faster, but we’ll be unlikely to nurture them to the extent of someone who has this passion and we we’ll be unlikely to apply these capabilities as aggressively as someone who is constantly striving to increase their impact in a particular domain.

Broadening our horizons

So, why does all of this matter? As I mentioned at the outset, virtually all of our conversations on the future of work are focused on the wrong thing. We’re understandably worried about our skills becoming obsolete (or, more accurately, performed much more efficiently by ever smarter machines). Understanding and embracing the learning pyramid can help us to broaden our horizons and focus on the elements required to learn faster. We’ll never equip ourselves to be successful in our lifelong learning journey if we don’t broaden our horizons and find a passion that will drive us to learn faster and nurture the capabilities required for learning.

Re-thinking our institutions

At a broader societal level, the learning pyramid can help us to understand how our institutions will need to evolve to support life-long learning. If I’m right about the learning pyramid, our educational system will need to be re-thought and re-designed from the ground up. Rather than focusing on transmitting broad-based knowledge and building skills, our schools will need to shift their focus to cultivating capabilities and drawing out and nurturing the passion that is latent within all of us. Rather than giving out certificates verifying that specific knowledge or skills have been acquired, schools will need to expand their horizons and become life-long learning coaches that get to know each of us individually at a very deep level and can help and challenge us to learn even faster throughout our lives by building deep and long-term trust-based relationships.

But, it doesn’t stop with our educational system. As I’ve written about elsewhere, all of our institutions will need to be re-imagined. Rather than thinking about learning as something that occurs in the occasional training programs that support a scalable efficiency operation, we’ll need to re-imagine our work environments in ways that can support scalable learning, learning that occurs day to day, on the job, in the work environment. If we’re serious about scalable learning, we’ll need to find ways to cultivate and amplify the passion of everyone who participates in our institutions. And, by the way, don't fall prey to the current focus on worker engagement. As I've written about here, worker engagement is helpful, but the success of our institutions in a world of mounting pressure will require us to find ways to cultivate passion among our workers.

The learning journey of the individual

And, what about us as individuals? How do we harness the learning pyramid to thrive in a world of accelerating change?

First, we shouldn’t wait for all of our institutions to catch up and help us to learn faster. That will take time and there’s urgency to acting quickly as our skills are at increasing risk of becoming obsolete.
We need to shift our attention to cultivating the capabilities required to learn faster. And how do we do that? Well, there are certainly a broad range of books and courses that focus on developing the core capabilities that I described above. But those can only go so far.

We’ll be much more successful if we focus on the base of the pyramid and find a domain that we can be truly passionate about. Most of us went to work because we wanted a paycheck. It turns out that paycheck will increasingly be dependent on finding work that we are truly passionate about. Without passion, we’ll never learn as fast and as effectively as someone who does have that passion. In a world of mounting performance pressure, that means we will become increasingly marginalized. Find your passion and the paycheck will follow.

If you haven't yet found your passion, don't stop. Many of us did not discover our passion until later in life (and many are still looking). In the meantime, focus on cultivating the capabilities for learning faster because those will help you to explore a variety of domains until you connect with your passion.

Bottom line

The current discussion of the future of work is a reflection of the short-termism that increasingly dominates business and all of our institutions. Get the right skills and everything will be alright. Beware – if we shrink our time horizons, we’ll get blind-sided by events on the horizon that come at us with increasing speed.

If we truly want to turn mounting performance pressure into expanding opportunity, we need to make a journey to the base of the pyramid. Until we find something that we can really be passionate about, we’ll experience increasing stress and, no matter how hard we try to learn, we’ll never learn as fast as those who have connected with their passion. But, here’s the real prize: when we connect with our passion, we will achieve far more of our potential and have far greater impact in the world around us. Isn’t that something worth striving for?

Seeking Strategic Advantage? Break Down Walls and Cultivate Networks

Where’s the advantage? In traditional business strategy, the answer was easy: build a wall. The companies with the highest and strongest walls would win. In the Big Shift, that answer becomes less credible. Walls work in stable worlds but they can actually become obstacles in more rapidly changing worlds. In the exponential world we’re entering, walls may be replaced by networks as the most promising sources of advantage.

I’ve become increasingly interested in how strategy will evolve in the Big Shift as revealed here and here. In this posting, I want to focus on the implications for how we think about competitive advantage. There’s no question about it – traditional sources of competitive advantage are eroding as revealed by our own analysis of long-term return on asset trends in the US economy and the well-known study of the rapidly shrinking lifetime of the successful companies that make it onto the prestigious S&P 500 list. What used to protect us from competition is becoming less and less effective.

Building walls

How did we build advantage in the past? We built walls. The walls took many different forms, but the key was to block potential competitors from entering our markets and taking our customers. One of the best ways of doing that was to acquire some proprietary knowledge, ideally something that could be protected with patents and copyrights. Even better if we could harness economies of scale that would reduce the number of companies operating in our markets – the economies of scale would become high walls that even the most intrepid challenger would find intimidating to scale.

These walls worked very well in stable times. Once built, they were durable and reliable. Companies could then focus all their time and energy on driving greater and greater efficiency into their operations to increase profit margins. Life was good.

But the times they are a’changing. The walls are becoming less and less effective in keeping competitors out. If the walls are based on proprietary knowledge, the accelerating pace of change means that proprietary knowledge is becoming obsolete at an accelerating rate.

If the walls are built around economies of scale, we’re seeing a variety of options opening up that can help new entrants overcome this barrier. For example, with contract manufacturing, a new entrant can leverage a promising new product by relying on the scale manufacturing capabilities of others. Similarly, new entrants can find ways to reach potential customers at scale by leveraging global market platforms – they no longer need to build their own scale-driven distribution channels.

So, does that mean that the potential for competitive advantage no longer exists? Far from it. It’s just that the sources of advantage are shifting in ways that most companies don’t yet understand, much less effectively harness.

Cultivating networks

In a more and more rapidly changing world, the key source of advantage will reside in the ability to become a concentration point for knowledge flows so that we can learn faster and gain the insight required to more effectively harness the long-term forces that are reshaping our global landscape.
I originally wanted to call this new source of advantage “bridges” because it provided such a visual contrast to walls, but there was a problem. Bridges, at least the physical ones that we know, have a key limitation – the more people who want to cross the bridge, the more crowded it gets, and eventually it turns into a parking lot, blocking any movement.

What we need are bridges that are capable of infinite expansion. More importantly, we need bridges where, the more people who use them, the more valuable the bridge becomes. What we need, in effect, are networks, capable of infinite connections, building bridges that can expand in all directions. So, I’m going to refer to the new source of advantage as networks, but primarily because they represent a new kind of bridge.

Recently, I wrote about networks as a new form of “net worth” for individuals, but it turns out that networks are also emerging as a key form of net worth for companies, even though not explicitly measured on the balance sheet.

Finding and occupying influence points

So, what’s required to become the concentration point of an expanding network? In an earlier blog post, I identified these concentration points as “influence points” and explored what the attributes of the most powerful influence points are likely to be.

Influence points matter. If you don’t understand what the emerging influence points in your relevant market arenas are likely to be, you’re in trouble. It means you certainly will not be effectively targeting them and, perhaps even more importantly, you will not understand what the implications will be if someone else occupies those influence points.

And here’s an important point: if you intend to build and occupy an influence point, there’s significant urgency. Influence points are driven by network effects which means that, once someone manages to occupy an influence point, they will be very difficult to challenge. That’s a key source of their advantage. So there really is not an option of being a “fast follower” if you want to harness this new form of strategic advantage. If you’re not first to critical mass in an emerging influence point, the game is likely over.

And just to be provocative, leaders who adopt the feminine archetype are going to be much more successful at building and occupying influence points. Leaders who adhere to the masculine archetype will be drawn to those walls and face considerable challenges if they venture beyond those walls and try to cultivate networks. It's one of many reasons that I maintain that the feminine archetype will ultimately prevail in business over the masculine archetype.

Choices to be made

To effectively target and occupy an influence point, companies will need to step back and ask the most fundamental question of all: what business am I in? I have suggested in other venues that most companies today are an unnatural bundle of three very different business types: infrastructure management, product innovation and commercialization and customer relationship businesses.

The companies that are most likely to occupy emerging influence points will be those who are tightly focused on either infrastructure management or customer relationship businesses (but not both – they’ll need to pick one). And, by the way, if you choose to focus on the product innovation and commercialization business, you’ll have a much harder time finding and occupying influence points – it’s one of the reasons I believe that those businesses will tend to fragment over time and have relatively high turnover rates.

The value of influence points

Influence points are strategically important because they concentrate knowledge flows in ways that help the owner of the influence point to learn faster and accelerate performance improvement. But, in a more rapidly changing world, there will need to be reciprocity here. If the owners of the influence points simply focus on aggregating, analyzing and acting on the knowledge for their own benefit, they will be increasingly vulnerable to challenges from those who offer to provide more value back to the participants in terms of feedback loops that can help everyone to learn faster, not just the owner of the influence point. There’s an interesting dynamic here: the more rapidly everyone learns and improves their performance, the more valuable the influence point becomes. Reciprocity actually strengthens advantage.

As we become more focused on the potential of artificial intelligence, the strategic value of influence points increases for one simple reason: artificial intelligence without access to lots of data is actually pretty stupid. Influence points become natural sites for the aggregation and rapid refreshing of data. Whoever owns these influence points will have a natural advantage in harnessing the insights and value that can be generated from artificial intelligence because they will have access to far more data than anyone else.

Advantage for individuals and countries

So far, I've been talking about strategy from the viewpoint of companies, but the same basic shift is playing out at the level of individuals and countries as well. Think about it. For individuals, the key to success was to accumulate a set of degrees and experiences that would qualify someone as an “expert.” In other words, advantage was built on proprietary knowledge that would insulate you from challenges by anyone else.

Now, it’s becoming increasingly apparent that if you consider yourself an expert, you simply don’t understand how rapidly the world is changing. The key to success going forward is the ability to cultivate rich networks of relationships with diverse people who can help you to learn faster. The strategy for success for individuals in the future will hinge on the ability to become a concentration point for a growing number of relationships – and on the ability to harness those relationships to learn faster.

There’s a similar dynamic playing out for cities, regions and nations. It used to be that your advantage at this level hinged on some set of natural resources or locational advantage (for example, having a coastal area with a natural harbor). That’s less and less true. The cities, regions and nations that are surging ahead are those that manage to become gathering spots for people with rich networks of relationships, and increasingly, relationships that extend well beyond existing geographic boundaries. In this context, I wrote a perspective several years ago that we need to shift our focus from the BRIC countries to the LUSTI countries, precisely because the latter are driven to connect beyond their borders because they were so small.

Walls as a source of vulnerability

So, if the sources of strategic advantage are shifting from walls to networks, what about those who continue to seek to hide behind walls? The walls that were so helpful in providing protection are increasingly becoming barriers to building the sources of advantage that are necessary for success in the Big Shift world. What were very effective sources of protection are now becoming sources of vulnerability. The illusion of protection breeds complacency and blinds us to the changes that are undermining our positions.

Bottom line

Feel the fear. If you’re not afraid, you don’t understand the changes that are playing out in the world around you. But don’t let the fear overcome you. Resist the temptation to hide behind the walls that served you so well in the past. Venture out into unfamiliar territory and find ways to connect with others that are facing similar challenges. By coming together and leveraging a growing array of diverse assets and capabilities, you will discover the ability to cultivate more and more of your potential and turn challenges into ever expanding opportunities.

Measuring Your Real Net Worth

Net worth is an important topic, but not in the way it’s usually discussed. We all know about net worth – it’s about assets and liabilities, and hopefully the assets are bigger than the liabilities.

But here’s the problem. Looking at net worth in financial terms focuses us on a lagging indicator. It tells us how we’ve done in the past, but it offers only limited insight into how we will do in the future.

Is there a different way of thinking about net worth? I believe there is, a way that’s much more insightful and help us to focus on what’s really important.

I believe that our best measure of net worth is our network. I say this with some hesitation because that statement can conjure up images of transactional networking: how many business cards have you been able to collect or, in somewhat more modern terms, how large is your Facebook or LinkedIn network?

I’m talking about a very different kind of network. It’s not about who you “know” but instead who really knows you? That moves it from a transactional collection of names and contact information to a much deeper focus on long-term, trust-based relationships.

If someone really knows you, that means you’ve been willing to be vulnerable with them. You’ve shared not just your strengths and accomplishments, but your failures and fears.

That’s one way of measuring of net worth in terms of your network, but there are other dimensions that need to be assessed. It’s one thing if someone really knows you, but it’s even more valuable if they actively use that knowledge not only to provide you with support and encouragement when the going gets tough, but also to challenge you when you’re missing opportunities for development and impact. To what extent are they actively helping you to achieve more of your potential, even if it takes you out of your comfort zone?

In that context, there’s another dimension that matters greatly. How diverse is your network? As we know, diversity takes many forms including gender, ethnic origins, and age. Underneath all of that, the question to really focus on is the cognitive diversity of your network of relationships – what are the backgrounds, experiences and perspectives of the people within your network and how diverse are they?

We’re all aware of the growing risk of “filter bubbles” that insulate us from different perspectives. To what extent are our networks helping us to escape those filter bubbles and exposing us to different ways of viewing the world?

There’s yet another dimension to explore in assessing your network. To what extent are the people in your network questing and risk-taking, always looking for new opportunities to increase impact, versus defensive and risk averse? In my experience, people with questing and risk-taking attributes generate and amplify energy within their networks, while people who are defensive and risk averse tend to drain energy.

Amplifying your network

These kinds of networks can be very challenging to cultivate, especially if you’re an introvert like me. I actually find that writing has been very helpful to me in building my network – it draws out people through the “power of pull” who are intrigued with my questions and ideas and who seek me out, people that I never would have found or connected with in my day to day interactions.

My passion also helps me to build a richer network because it encourages me to ask questions and ask for help, rather than just sitting here and pretending that I know all the answers. I’ve found that people who have cultivated the passion of the explorer have much richer and more diverse networks because they are not just willing, but compelled, to be vulnerable because of their overwhelming desire to venture beyond what they already know.

Having said that, I would welcome advice and insight on how introverts (and others) can be more intentional about cultivating the kinds of personal networks that I’ve described above. It’s an area that I’m still exploring.

The growing importance of networks

So, why does all of this matter? It matters because we’re living in a world of mounting performance pressure – the Big Shift, as we’ve come to describe it. It’s a world where, no matter what credentials, accomplishments and financial net worth you’ve accumulated in the past, you'll be increasingly challenged to reach higher and higher levels of performance or risk being marginalized.

In that kind of world, you’ll need to learn faster and faster. No matter how smart you are, you’ll learn a lot faster if you’re embedded in a personal network of people who share the attributes that I described above. And the larger your network, the faster you and everyone else will learn. This is why your personal network is your best leading indicator of net worth in financial terms.

This isn’t just about pressure, it’s also about extraordinary opportunity. And it’s not just about financial opportunity in terms of creating more and more value and reaping the financial rewards from that. At a much more fundamental level, it’s about the opportunity that we all have to achieve much more of our potential. It’s also about the opportunity to live much richer lives, enriched by the deep relationships that emerge among people who share the desire to achieve more of their potential.

Can these networks scale?

I can hear the skeptics saying that this is all very interesting, but these kinds of relationships can’t scale. We're all familiar with the Dunbar number.  If we’re talking about really deep, trust-based relationships where we know each other in our full complexity, there’s a limit to how many of these relationships we can sustain. Agreed. But this is where I have a feeling that some of my perspectives on creation spaces can come into play.

Based on the research that we’ve pursued at the Center for the Edge, I’ve come to believe that there’s a distinctive organizational form that can scale and accelerate learning for all of the participants. Briefly, the core unit of a creation space is a group of 5-15 people who develop deep, trust-based relationships with each other. But that core group is then connected into a much broader network of other groups who share a similar quest for increasing impact and who can become resources to address particularly gnarly questions. These creation spaces can be found in everything from extreme sports and social movements to scientific endeavors and music.

So, the key is to find and cultivate that small group of people that you can work with to achieve greater impact. But, don’t stop there. The key is find a way to connect that group into a much broader network of similarly motivated groups that can become resources to draw on when you’re wrestling with quests that are particularly challenging.

Is that all there is?

Not at all. Like most things in life, this is complicated. I can also hear the skeptics asking about the importance of “weak ties”, citing the work of Mark Granovetter. In some path-breaking research, he discovered that often the greatest value to a participant in a network comes from people with weaker ties, not the people with the deepest relationships. This is because the people with weak ties often have connections and insights that are more far reaching and diverse than might be shared among a small group of people with rich connections, but who often share many of the same interests and relationships.

While striving for more diversity within your core group can help to compensate for this, there will always be room for, and value in, “weak ties.” Looser and broader connections can always be helpful, but not at the expense of the deep, trust-based relationships that will help to accelerate learning and performance improvement.

But what about the liabilities?

If we’re talking about net worth, assets are balanced by liabilities. So far, we’ve just been talking about another way to frame assets in thinking about net worth. What are the liabilities to offset the assets?

There are many. Perhaps the greatest liability is our tendency to spread ourselves too thinly across too many activities, so that we can’t invest the significant time and effort required to really build, sustain and nurture our network of deep, trust-based relationships. In this context, just building a larger and larger network of superficial and transactional relationships can consume our time and make it more challenging for us to focus on the people and relationships that really matter. We all need to take a hard look at the growing demands on our time and find ways to free up the time required to build the networks that will really matter.

Other liabilities are more personal. Most importantly, they tend to involve the fear, insecurity and risk averseness that prevents us from being vulnerable with others. These feelings are completely understandable and natural in a world of mounting performance pressure but the paradox is that, the more we fall prey to these feelings, the more likely we are to fail.

Bottom line

Your real net worth is your network. If you’re not cultivating your personal network in ways that draw out more of your potential (and the potential of others), whatever financial net worth you might have today is likely to diminish. This is the leading indicator that will give you a better sense of your ability to achieve more of your potential, and to reap many different forms of rewards along the way.

[Full disclosure: I wrote a book called Net Worth almost 20 years ago. In that book, I focused on yet another way of thinking about net worth: focusing on the net worth that is latent in the personal data about ourselves and enlisting the help of trusted agents to help us maximize that net worth. It just goes to show that there are many ways to think about net worth.]

Crafting Corporate Narratives: Zoom Out, Zoom In

I’ve been writing a lot about the significant missed opportunity to craft a compelling corporate narrative here and here. Done right, this corporate narrative can mobilize a large number of third parties to provide growing leverage, learning and loyalty for the company offering the narrative.

While this is appealing to many executives, they stumble over the process of crafting a compelling narrative. How do they identify a powerful opportunity out in the future that’s both credible and motivating to a large number of third parties? After all, the future is so uncertain that it can feel very intimidating to peer out over the horizon and look for these kinds of opportunities.

The zoom out, zoom in strategy approach

It definitely will take executives out of their comfort zone, but it’s a comfort zone that they need to escape if they’re going to continue to create value in a rapidly changing world. It turns out that “zoom out, zoom in,” an approach to strategy that I have been championing, can be a powerful tool to help craft corporate narratives.

The zoom out, zoom in approach emerged first among a number of successful Silicon Valley companies, but it can be applied by any company that wants to avoid the risk of falling into incremental, reactive strategies. It challenges the conventional strategic planning horizon of one to five years (we’re all familiar with the five year strategic plan). Instead, this approach to strategy focuses on two very different horizons – 10 – 20 years (zoom out) and 6-12 months (zoom in). Companies pursuing this kind of strategy actually spend very limited time on the one to five year horizon – their view is that, if they get the other two horizons right, everything else will take care of itself.

On the 10 – 20 year horizon, they focus on two questions: First, what will our relevant market or industry look like 10 – 20 years from now? Second, what kind of company will we need to be in order to be successful in that market or industry?

To be clear, they’re not seeking a detailed blueprint of the future 10 – 20 years but instead are focused on the most powerful and predictable trends that will significantly affect industry structure. One successful pioneer in the personal computer business back in the early 1980s had a zoom out view that could be summarized in two sentences: “Computing is inexorably moving from centralized mainframes to desktop computers. If you want to be a leader in the computer industry, you will need to be a leader on the desktop.”

That’s certainly not a detailed view of the future, but it was clear enough that it enabled the company to make the right choices in the short-term. This leads to the zoom in part of the strategy.

On the 6-12 month horizon, the focus shifts to identifying 2-3 business initiatives (no more, only 2-3) that could have the greatest impact in accelerating the movement of the company towards its zoom out destination over the next 6-12 months. For each of these business initiatives, the two key questions are: Do we have a critical mass of resources deployed against this initiative? What are the metrics that we can use during the 6-12 month period to assess our progress towards achieving the impact that we are seeking?

If you sit in a leadership meeting of a company pursuing this approach to strategy, you’ll find that the executives shift quickly and seamlessly across these two horizons as they continually seek to refine their zoom out view based on the progress (or lack thereof) of their zoom in initiatives while at the same time evolving their zoom in initiatives to more effectively target the zoom out opportunity.

The zoom out, zoom in approach to strategy is a powerful way to overcome two related challenges for large, existing companies. First, it pulls executives out a short-term mindset regarding the business and helps them to build alignment around a shared long-term view of relevant markets or industries. Second, it helps them to develop tighter focus and overcome a natural tendency to spread themselves too thinly across too many business initiatives, none of which receive a critical mass of support. Most importantly, the focus that they develop is related to a longer-term opportunity, not just prioritizing among the multitude of short-term events that command their attention on a daily basis.

This approach to strategy employs a broad range of scenario development tools and approaches to draw executives out of their comfort zone, but it differs from scenario development as commonly practiced on multiple levels. First, it forces the executives to pick not just the most probable scenario, but the scenario that they will commit to pursuing. Second, it explicitly addresses the potential to shape scenarios and the probability of their playing out. Most scenario exercises treat the future as an external given and therefore it’s only necessary to assess the likelihood of various outcomes. Third, and most important, the zoom out, zoom in approach requires the participants to commit significant resources to several short-term initiatives that are driven by the longer-term zoom out view of the market. This is not just an abstract, conceptual exercise – it has real impact on near-term resource allocation.

Crafting a corporate narrative

So, how does this all contribute to the development of a compelling corporate narrative? The zoom out, zoom in strategy approach can provide a very useful context to craft a corporate narrative. And the focus on crafting a narrative that is a call to action to others outside the company can help to overcome some of the common pitfalls in developing a powerful zoom out view of the business.

The zoom out view can provide a structured way to identify and focus on promising opportunities that are emerging from long-term forces playing out over decades. The narrative framework provides an important filter for prioritizing opportunities. Too often, executives of companies understandably tend to focus on opportunities exclusively through the lens of their own company. They take an inside-out view of the future.

The most effective zoom out, zoom in approach is one that starts by zooming out to anticipate how customers are likely to evolve and what their most significant emerging unmet needs are likely to be. Seen through this lens, we are likely to see emerging opportunities from a customer perspective. Of course, there will always be a need to bring this back to the company to confirm that there’s a significant opportunity for the company in addressing these unmet needs.

But, if we do this right, we now have the makings of a long-term opportunity that could be a powerful call to action to many others outside the company, ranging from customers to third parties that have the ability to offer complementary products and services to augment whatever the company can offer to customers.

The key is to make it clear that the opportunity out in the future is not inevitable, that there are challenges and obstacles that stand in the way, and that achieving the opportunity will require action from many parties. But the motivation to move forward will come from a clear view of why many parties can benefit from pursuing the opportunity, not just the company crafting the narrative. Ideally, the opportunity is one that will in fact expand as the number of participants grows, unleashing network effects that will draw more and more participants in over time.

The zoom in part of the approach also can play a critical role in crafting a credible narrative. The most powerful narratives are ones where relatively modest actions in the near-term can yield tangible impact in advancing participants towards the longer-term opportunity. These are much more motivating than narratives that require millions of dollars of investment and years of development before any impact can be achieved.

By pursuing zoom in initiatives, the company crafting the narrative can start to build credibility for the broader narrative by showing near-term impact in accelerating movement towards the longer-term opportunity. This can inspire those being called to action to focus on near-term impact as well.

Shaping strategies

Those of you who have been following me for a while will start to see several threads in my writing start to weave together into a tapestry. In this blog post, I’ve focused on how my concept of corporate narrative can be enhanced by pursuing a zoom out, zoom in approach to strategy.

But there’s another thread worth mentioning. I wrote an article for Harvard Business Review many years ago on the power of shaping strategies. Rather than falling into a reactive mindset, sensing and responding to whatever is happening around us, I argued that there’s a growing opportunity to pursue shaping strategies that seek to restructure entire markets and industries by mobilizing a growing number of third parties to invest in a new industry structure.

Hopefully, one can see how corporate narratives can provide incentives to mobilize third parties to act in pursuing the opportunity to restructure the market or industry. And, one might be able to see how a zoom out, zoom in strategy approach can help to generate a compelling corporate narrative and provide the foundation for a shaping strategy designed to mobilize others.

Bottom line

There’s another thread underneath all of this. We need to harness the power of pull so that small moves, if they’re smartly made, can set big things in motion. Corporate narratives pull a growing number of third parties together to pursue a long-term opportunity. If framed in the context of a zoom out zoom in strategy, these narratives can help to provide growing leverage, learning and loyalty for the company crafting the narrative.

To harness the power of pull more effectively, ask yourself the following questions about the company or organization you are involved with:

• Do we have a shared view of what the most significant unmet needs of relevant customers will be 10 – 20 years from now?
• Do we have a shared view of what kind of company we’ll need to be 10 – 20 years from now?
• Have we framed a corporate narrative that is a powerful call to action for others outside our company to address a long-term opportunity?
• Are we pursuing a small number of short-term initiatives aggressively enough to demonstrate significant near-term impact?
• Are we reflecting regularly on all of the above to ensure that we are evolving and refining these approaches to generate even more impact?

Where Are You Headed? What’s Your Narrative and Purpose?

In my last blog post, I explored the distinction between purpose and narrative in the context of institutions. I’m going to shift here to explore how these concepts operate at the level of the individual. There are some similarities, but there are also some differences.

For those who haven't read my previous posts, let me start with some definitions. I’ve been exploring narrative for years, but I have a very specific meaning for the word. As those who have followed me know, I make a key distinction between stories and narratives. In short, stories for me have two characteristics: they’re self-contained (they have a beginning, a middle and an ending) and they’re about the story teller or some other people, but they’re not about you (although you can use your imagination to explore what you might have done in the story). In contrast, narratives for me are open-ended, there is no resolution yet, but there is some significant opportunity or threat on the horizon that is yet to be achieved and it’s not clear whether it will be achieved. The resolution of the narrative hinges on you: it is a call to action to those you are addressing, telling them that their choices and actions will play a material role in helping to resolve the narrative. You can find more on this here and here.

There are lots of definitions of purpose, so let me offer mine. I consider purpose to be a commitment to achieve some kind of significant impact in the world around you.

Exploring personal narratives

So, what’s the connection between narrative and purpose at the level of the individual? Here, I must tread softly since I know there’s a whole discipline of “narrative psychology”, and I happen to disagree with most of the ways these folks discuss narratives. I’m not saying they're wrong and I’m right; I’m simply suggesting that I have a different approach to narratives that may provide some additional insight and value that the conventional approaches do not.

Narrative psychologists tend to approach narratives as stories. A personal narrative in their view is an individual’s construction of the story of their life to make sense of how they have lived their lives. It’s backward looking, exploring the past to gain insight into why you have lived your life the way you have. There’s certainly value to be had from this exercise.

But my view of personal narratives emphasizes the future, rather than the past. In my approach, personal narratives are really about your view of the future. What’s the big opportunity or threat that you perceive out in the future that ultimately will shape all of your choices and actions?

There’s another difference. Narrative psychologists tend to focus on the individual and how they have lived their lives. The narrative is about the individual. In my framing, a personal narrative is really about your call to action to others – what is it that you want them to do to help you address that opportunity or threat out in the future?

Exploring your own narrative

So, why does this matter? While I believe we can gain significant insight by looking into our past, I ultimately believe that our greatest value will come from asking what kind of opportunity or threat out in the future is most meaningful to us at this point in time. Of course, our view of that opportunity or threat is likely shaped by our experiences in the past, but the key starting point for me is to take a hard look first at our view of the future today.

Few of us have made that view explicit to ourselves, much less reflected on it, and yet it will shape all of our key decisions and actions as we move forward. Equally important, I believe we need to shift our focus from ourselves to others. No matter how strong and smart we are as individuals, we’ll be a lot stronger and smarter if we can connect with and work with others who are motivated by the opportunity or threat that we’ve identified.

Now, in that context, a look into the past can be very illuminating. How has our view of the future evolved through our lives and what help have we sought from others? Has that view of the future been a productive one, a view that has helped us focus on the things that really matter to us? Has that view of the future been one that could motivate others to join us on the journey and invest significant time and effort from their side to make more progress on the journey? Is there a higher impact view of the future now that could help us to achieve even more impact in areas that really matter to us?

And that brings us to purpose

That inquiry leads quickly into the question of purpose. What kind of future impact is most meaningful to us and are we most committed to achieving? Is that opportunity or threat that we see out on the horizon really the one that matters the most to us personally or are we simply reflecting some broader societal perceptions?

I fear that too many of us still focus our narratives on opportunities that have been defined for us by others. Achieve success in the profession that your parents pressured you into. Get married and raise good kids. Be a good citizen.

But, the question that rarely gets asked is whether those are the things that really matter to you or did you just fall into them because that’s what you thought others expected of you?

The most successful personal narratives are those that are shaped by a genuine and deeply held sense of personal purpose. Why are you here on this earth? What do you most want to be remembered for? What kind of impact will give you the most satisfaction?

I hasten to add here that, unlike many people, I don’t equate purpose with some broader sense of social good like curing world hunger or reversing climate change. Those kinds of things may indeed be your purpose, but purpose for many can be much more mundane. It could be fixing appliances, cleaning clothes, carving amazing things out of wood, or just maintaining a building for its residents. These may seem mundane to you, but to many individuals it is what gets them really excited and gives them fulfillment.

High impact purpose requires passion

For me, personal purpose is ultimately about passion – a very specific form of passion that I call “the passion of the explorer” and that I’ve discussed at length in blog posts and research reports (for examples, look here and here). This passion starts with a long-term commitment to making an increasing impact in a specific domain. People with this form of passion aren't satisfied with simply learning about a domain or having impact in that domain – they're determined to make an increasing impact through action over time. As a result, they have a questing disposition – they're excited by, and seek out, challenges that will help them to get better faster. And, they also have a connecting disposition – their first reaction when confronted with an unexpected challenge is to seek to connect with others who can help them get to a better answer faster.

Few of us have been fortunate enough to discover our passion, much less integrate it into our profession. Our survey of the US workforce suggests that at most 13% of workers are passionate about their work. Yet, I believe we’re all capable of passion and we all hunger inside for this passion – it is after all, a powerful way for us to achieve far more of our potential.

So, what happened? Our institutions, driven by a quest for scalable efficiency, have taught us from our first day of school that our key goal is to fit in, accept the priorities of the institution, and perform predictably and reliably. You don’t matter; the institution does.

How does this shape our personal narratives? We tend to focus on opportunities or threats that are meaningful to our institutions and not to us. We also tend not to ask for help because, in a world of scalable efficiency, asking for help tends to be viewed as a sign of weakness. In contrast, people with the passion of the explorer are driven to ask for help because they see the potential for even greater impact by working together.

Is it any wonder that our personal narratives tend to be frustrating and ineffective? They’re not really ours. They’re what we think others want to hear.

Connecting personal narratives and purpose

This is the powerful connection I see between purpose and personal narratives. Purpose is about what is really meaningful and exciting to the individual, not the institution – it is about uncovering our passion of the explorer. Until we discover that passion, we’re never going to be really effective in mobilizing others to join us in our quest and we will remain frustrated, isolated individuals struggling to achieve impact in areas that don’t really matter to us.

At the end of the day, it really is about connecting with and leveraging the support of others – that’s what successful personal narratives accomplish. If we haven't found our purpose that shapes how we frame the opportunity ahead, whatever opportunity we land on will lack credibility to others. We're remarkably good at determining whether someone is genuinely excited and driven by an opportunity or is simply playing a game defined by others. If you as an individual are not genuinely excited and driven by an opportunity, how can you expect others to get excited by the opportunity?

Also, if we’re not really asking for help from others in our personal narrative, how can we possibly expect the support we all need in a world of mounting performance pressure? Asking for help expresses vulnerability, it acknowledges that we can’t accomplish something on our own. That expression of vulnerability builds trust. Building trust helps to motivate people to join together and embark on some challenging journeys together.

But, wait, what’s the likelihood of getting much help if the opportunity defined by our purpose is a deeply personal one? Doesn’t that by definition preclude help from others who are driven by their own deeply personal purpose?

The purpose may be a deeply personal one, but the opportunity defined by that purpose is something that likely will be meaningful to many. And it will become even more meaningful to others if they see how deeply committed you are to it, not just in words, but in action. The key is to show through your own actions how deeply committed you are to achieving impact. Others who care about impact in the same domain will soon take notice and eagerly respond to your request for help. Take the example of someone who is passionate about fixing appliances. The opportunity that would become the basis of a personal narrative is to minimize downtime of appliances, something that many could embrace as an opportunity worth working for.

Bottom line

There's an untapped opportunity to achieve far more of our potential. We all have personal narratives that are guiding our lives and shaping our relationships with others, yet few of us have taken the time to make those narratives explicit and to reflect on whether these are truly the personal narratives that could maximize the impact that is most meaningful to us.

Here are some questions we might ask that could help us evolve our narratives in ways that are most meaningful and impactful for us:

• What is the opportunity (or threat) that guides my narrative today?
• Have I discovered a passion that could frame my purpose?
• If yes, does this opportunity (or threat) reflect my passion and purpose?
• If I haven’t yet discovered my passion, what can I do to explore further and connect with a passion that is most meaningful to me?