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Expanding Horizons Through Corporate Narratives

I’ve become increasingly interested in the role that corporate narratives can play in driving business success in more competitive markets – something that I've written about here and here.  While many people find the concept of corporate narratives interesting, they often struggle with what a narrative might look like for their company.

This isn’t surprising given how few effective corporate narratives there are out there. In fact, I’ve only found two that really serve as good examples of corporate narratives – the narratives developed by Apple and Nike.

The defining elements of a narrative

As many will recall from my previous writing, I view narratives as having two key attributes.  First, they’re open-ended – there’s no resolution yet, it’s all to be determined.  Second, narratives are about the intended audience, not the person or entity presenting the narrative.  In fact, the resolution of the narrative hinges upon the choices and actions yet to be taken by the audience – the resolution is up to them.

This is probably the most difficult element of narratives for executives to internalize.  There’s a natural tendency to think about corporate “narratives” that talk about the humble beginnings of the company, the obstacles it confronted, the amazing things it’s achieved and the great opportunities ahead. That’s an open-ended story about the company, but it’s not a narrative that identifies opportunities for the people outside the company to pursue on their own.

At their most fundamental level, narratives answer three questions:

• Why are we here?

• What can we accomplish?

• How should we connect in order to accomplish this?

To be clear, the “we” in these questions is primarily about the people the narrative is trying to reach, not the individual or company crafting the narrative, although of course the company can play a role in helping those people to accomplish what they were meant to accomplish.

So, what might some corporate narratives look like?  Purely as hypothetical examples, let me offer some ideas for what might work as narratives for companies in different industries.

A hypothetical narrative for a healthcare provider

Throughout history we’ve focused on treating disease – it’s been a reactive proposition. We wait until we get sick and then we seek out help to get the illness treated and get well again. But we’re on the cusp of a very big shift. We are now developing the technology and the science that will allow us to monitor our physical condition in real-time and give us much greater insight into what promotes our individual health and well-being through an expanding array of mobile digital devices. We can now take timely action to further improve our condition.

That action might be on our own or in collaboration with a growing array of wellness providers specializing in different dimensions of wellness. The exciting opportunity now is to tailor our wellness approaches to our unique individual circumstances and to evolve those wellness approaches as our circumstances change.

Of course, we’re all going to get sick at some point in our lives, but we’ll be in a lot better position to recover faster with fewer side effects if we’ve invested the time and effort to get to know our body when it is healthy and understand more deeply what it requires to be healthy.  Rather than simply being yet another patient with a particular disease, we now become unique individuals with distinctive requirements to achieve and maintain health.

None of this is a given.  It requires commitment and effort from each of us, but by working together we can achieve and sustain even higher levels of wellness. While we each are unique, we can begin to see patterns in terms of what drives wellness and more rapid recovery from illness. We can also help to strengthen our individual commitment by gaining reinforcement from others who are similarly motivated. This is just a high level summary of what a narrative might look like for a healthcare provider. Such a narrative might be captured by the slogan “Focus on wellness, rather than illness.”

A hypothetical narrative for a bank

For more than a century, our lives followed a similar script. We went to school to get a good job that would last a lifetime. It might not be the most satisfying work, but it would provide us with a reliable paycheck to support ourselves and our loved ones. We would then reap a nice pension for our efforts that would allow us to play golf or bridge with others into our (regrettably short) golden years.

But that’s all changing now. As science and medicine help us to remain healthier longer, we now have for the first time an opportunity to craft another chapter to our life, one that might last almost as long as our first career. We have a chance to re-orient our life around a passion that makes a larger and larger difference in the world around us – and we can have an even greater impact by connecting with others who share our passion. To take advantage of this new opportunity, we’ll need to think and plan ahead to make sure that our financial resources are sufficient. 

But that’s not all.  Why wait for retirement? Why settle for collecting a paycheck and being stressed by the uninteresting work we do? Digital technology is systematically reducing barriers to entry in market after market. We saw the effects first in media businesses like film making and writing. But digital technology is spreading and transforming other technologies like manufacturing technologies and medical technologies, making it easier and easier for someone with a passion to gain access to the means of production and start new businesses.

Given these new developments, why don’t we step back now and determine what we’re really passionate about and in the next few years craft a path that allows us to integrate our passion and our profession?  Why wait until retirement to pursue something we’re really passionate about? Why not find others we can connect with today to help integrate our passion and profession?

This is an exciting opportunity but it's not going to happen automatically or easily. To take advantage of it, we need to carefully assess the resources we have and find ways to augment those resources so that we’ll have more of a cushion as we go through a potentially challenging shift in jobs, and perhaps even start our own business.  Such a narrative might be captured by the slogan “Pursue your passion”

A hypothetical narrative for a battery vendor

OK, but healthcare providers and banks naturally have the potential to address some larger and more motivating opportunities. What about companies involved in more mundane activities or products? Let’s take the example of a company that sells a very mundane item like batteries.  What might their narrative look like?

Well, their narrative might begin by observing that throughout history we’ve been prisoners of our technology. From the earliest days when we settled down to grow crops through the industrial era, we were tied to the means of production. And it got worse over time. As electricity made its way into our lives, we became prisoners of our homes – if we wanted to watch a movie or listen to music, we could go only as far as the electrical cord plugged into the wall socket would allow.

But that’s all changing now.  We now have a growing opportunity to go anywhere anytime, to free ourselves of physical constraints and yet stay connected and be able to enjoy all the benefits and comforts of our home. As we can venture farther afield without compromising comfort or convenience, what might we accomplish?

We could enjoy a greater diversity of experience, learn faster and have an even greater impact on those around us. That’s the real opportunity – it’s an opportunity to take ourselves to a new level of impact, to make a difference that previously would have been impossible when we had to choose between staying tethered to an electrical outlet or dramatically expanding our freedom of movement.

Now, we can take everything with us, regardless of where we are. Instead of people coming to us, we can go to them and bring all of our resources (e.g., information and applications) with us to do whatever needs to be done. The ability to have much greater impact is now available.  Where and how will we choose to have that impact? Once again, we might be able to capture this rich narrative in a slogan – “Expand your horizons”

Narratives for companies in the business to business space

The examples I’ve given above are all in the consumer space because they’re easier for all of us to relate to, but there are equally powerful narrative opportunities in the business to business space.  In this domain, the narrative still speaks to people outside the company framing the narrative, but they are people in the context of their jobs.  Typically, the people to be addressed in these narratives are people who would use the products and services of the company offering the narrative. 

Just as in the consumer space, the challenge is to pull back from the narrow product or service we’re offering. We need to understand much more deeply the context of the people we’re trying to reach to be able to identify broader opportunities that might be available to these people in their work environment, opportunities that would motivate them to achieve even greater impact and, in the process, take their own companies to a new level. The goal is to excite them about the possibilities and help them to think and act in a much more powerful way.

What makes a strong corporate narrative?

Let’s pull back from these specific examples and reflect on the attributes of a strong corporate narrative.

• They align with powerful forces at work in the broader economy and society. They gain additional power by leveraging desires and capabilities that are emerging and shaped by forces that extend far beyond any individual company.

• They invite open-ended participation. They frame an opportunity for action and impact at a very high level, but leave enough room for individuals or small groups to be creative in figuring out what specific actions and impact might be achieved in specific contexts. By staying at a high level, narratives can evolve to accommodate changing circumstances.

• They are realistic about the challenges and obstacles that will confront the individual or small group as they pursue the opportunities. It’s a fine line but a strong narrative excites people about the opportunity while also alerting them to the challenges – it’s all part of the message that the opportunity is not a given or pre-determined. People will need to make an effort to achieve it.

• They present positive sum opportunities. What I mean by this is that strong narratives create incentives for people to come together to address the opportunity. If we’re in a zero sum world where either you win or I win, it is much more difficult for us to collaborate.  On the other hand, if we’re in a positive sum world where we can expand the total value created by working together, then we have much more motivation to seek each other out and collaborate.

• They invite participation at the outset with relatively low investment of time or effort and provide some tangible and relatively quick benefit from that effort.  This reduces barriers to entry and offers quick reinforcement of the benefits of participation which can then cascade into much more significant efforts. 

The competitive advantage created by corporate narratives

So, why does all of this matter?  As I’ve discussed elsewhere, corporate narratives offer some powerful benefits in an increasingly competitive global economy. They help to provide compelling differentiation and leverage by pulling people to us and building long-term relationships, but they also catalyze distributed innovation as the people we attract begin to venture out in pursuit of the opportunity we have framed.

They also have a central role in motivating the employees within the company. Even though narratives do not explicitly speak to them, they help the employees to understand how they can have an impact on people outside the company far beyond selling them more products and services.

Those who master the art of compelling narratives will have a much stronger competitive advantage than those who ignore this opportunity.

Bottom line

No matter what businesses our companies are in, they’ll derive a significant advantage by finding ways to craft a narrative that speaks to relevant people far beyond our companies.  There’s a much deeper question about how to craft a compelling narrative which I’ll save for a future posting.  Let me just caution for now that this isn’t something that can be handed over to a marketing department or a PR firm.  Powerful narratives emerge from sustained and widespread actions by the company that demonstrate the commitment of the company to act in ways that are consistent with the narrative.  A successful narrative therefore requires the deep understanding, commitment and engagement of the entire leadership of a company.

The Big Shift in Influence

Influence is becoming more and more challenging.  It’s hard enough to attract attention, much less retain it or use that attention to shape the behavior of others. And yet, in a world of scarce resources and mounting pressure, the ability to influence others becomes more and more central to the ability to set big things in motion.

In my last blog post, I talked about the increasing strategic importance of influence points for institutions.  Now, let’s shift focus and talk about the changing nature of influence at the individual level – how do we achieve more influence as individuals?

The old way

In the old days, it was simple and straightforward.  We built influence by having answers. The focus at that point was to master ways of communicating those answers so that we were able to persuade others that our answers were better than anyone else’s. We built influence by demonstrating strength, carefully crafting a presentation of our accomplishments and impact so that those answers we were trying to communicate became a lot more credible because we had a strong track record of being right in the past.  Finally, we built influence by becoming the hub of an ever-expanding network of like-minded people who embraced our answers and helped us to persuade others of the value of our answers.

Those days are increasingly behind us.  Sure, there are still some who are looking for reassurance and security. Those people may still be influenced by this conventional approach. But this is a very static approach to building influence in an increasingly dynamic world. Answers can be helpful but they only have a fixed value. And answers, no matter how good they are, tend to become obsolete at an accelerating rate.  As conditions evolve, those answers that only a little while ago seemed so compelling and helpful now begin to seem stale and worn.

The new way

In an exponential world, answers have rapidly diminishing value. The greatest value in this kind of environment comes from questions, questions that no one had even thought to ask but that help to focus attention and effort on promising but previously ignored areas. Questions invite a different and more powerful form of participation. It’s no longer just about spreading the word and persuading others.  It’s about inviting others to explore a new domain and help to generate new ideas and insights.

Framing the questions

In this context, not all questions are created equal.

• The questions that have the greatest potential to influence are broad ones that create space for many people across many different domains and disciplines to participate.
• They are questions where there’s a lot at stake, where enormous value and wealth can be generated by those who are most successful in generating insight.
• They are also deep ones that call for sustained effort over a long period of time to generate insight. They are the questions that will keep a growing number of people occupied for many, many years.
• But they are also questions that can be tackled without massive investment of funds and years of effort before any insight is generated. The best kinds of questions are ones where early “a-ha” moments can occur so that early participants in the questions can get positive reinforcement for their efforts and yet at the same time realize that there is so much more to be explored. 

Questions like these do many things.  They attract and excite a growing number of people who can see the opportunity for impact.  They spur the imagination since the territory is yet to be explored. They invite experimentation, tinkering, innovation and discussion as people strive to move beyond imagination to test potential approaches.

Vulnerability and trust

But questions do something else that’s absolutely vital for influence – they rapidly build trust with the person posing the questions. The person posing these kinds of questions has just done something very important – s/he has expressed vulnerability.  S/he has acknowledged there’s something really important that s/he doesn’t know and needs help to solve. 

The fact that the person posing the question does this from the outset invites all those who are attracted to the questions to do the same.  It’s OK to admit we don’t know something – in fact, it’s a pre-requisite to make progress.  Expressing this kind of vulnerability early on builds trust and provides a strong foundation for trust-based relationships. Rather than showing strength, the most effective way to build influence may now paradoxically be to show vulnerability.

This is important for a lot of reasons but let’s just focus on one: it enhances our ability to access the tacit knowledge that each participant brings to the question.  Tacit knowledge is the knowledge that exists in our heads and that we have a really hard time expressing to ourselves, much less to anyone else.  If we have trust-based relationships with others, we’re far more willing to make the effort and risk some embarrassment as we try to express this tacit knowledge. And, in new frontiers of exploration, that tacit knowledge is often the most valuable knowledge, containing far more insight than the stuff that’s already expressed in papers and books.

Mobilizing mesh networks

So, questions are really, really valuable in expanding influence. What are other mechanisms to build influence? In the past, as mentioned earlier, we were advised to aggressively build our networks of relationships, becoming a hub in a growing network of people who were persuaded, or at least could be persuaded, by the answers we were seeking to disseminate.

That kind of approach is less productive if we’re focused on new questions rather than answers. If the goal is to effectively explore and discover new insights, we need a different kind of network. We’d want to encourage much more of a mesh network where there’s a rich and complex set of relationships connecting all participants with each other. This kind of network increases the potential of all participants to connect with each other in unexpected and evolving ways as they embark on their exploration. We can become mobilizers, helping to draw in new people and creating environments where people can connect and explore an evolving agenda of questions.

If we insist on remaining the sole channel for all interactions within the network, we’ll soon become overwhelmed by the task. Very quickly, we’ll become a bottleneck to robust exploration of the terrain ahead. We’ll be far more successful in extending our influence if we create environments that encourage all participants to connect with each other and provide the mechanisms to facilitate both systematic search and unplanned serendipity. The most powerful networks would take the form of creation spaces that support the formation of tightly knit teams and then connect these teams in a broader space where they can seek out help from each other.

But what about the influence that comes from having privileged access to knowledge flows? Won’t we undermine that by moving away from hub and spoke networks to mesh networks? Not to worry, by posing the questions that excite and motivate everyone to embark on their exploration, we’ll still have privileged access to the knowledge flows occurring within the network.  Whenever someone comes up with an insight that they think is important, they’ll want to reach out and vet it with us. And if we continue to refine and evolve the questions as new insights become available, participants will continue to connect with us to get the most up to date framing of the questions that matter.

Influence in action – the Santa Fe Institute

OK, now this can all seem pretty abstract. Are there any examples of influence being generated through questions and mesh networks? There are many, but let me point to one that I am personally involved in.  It’s the Santa Fe Institute (SFI).  SFI was founded 30 years ago by a group of leading scientists, notably led by a chemist, George Cowan, and including David Pines, Stirling Colgate, Murray Gell-Mann, Nick Metropolis, Herb Anderson, and Peter A. Carruthers.

They were all very prominent in their fields at the time but what brought them together was a set of questions about potential common themes regarding complex adaptive systems that cut across traditional disciplinary boundaries. They certainly didn’t have any answers, but the questions were exciting.  Were there patterns that could help us to better understand everything from sub-atomic particles to the universe, with the human brain and society thrown in the middle? How do new elements emerge within these systems? How do these systems evolve? What are the elements that make some of these systems more adaptable and resilient than others?

They decided to set up an institute to pursue these questions. But they were careful from the outset to think in terms of catalyzing and growing a network of inquiry.  Yes, they had a few resident researchers but they put much more emphasis on identifying and connecting with people from around the world and from many different disciplines – for example, archaeology, anthropology, biology, chemistry, economics, mathematics, physics, and sociology – who were intrigued by these questions. 

They created programs that helped to connect these people with each other and shared the research that these participants were pursuing. Early findings led to even more questions and SFI has evolved as an orchestrator of inquiry, expanding and evolving its network as the questions evolved. In the process, it has had influence far beyond its core staff, penetrating virtually every academic discipline. The influence also extended out into the business world as businesspeople began to explore how their firms and their markets might demonstrate the behavior of complex adaptive systems. What had begun as a few curious scientists meeting over lunch at Los Alamos has evolved into a highly influential global network of people excited and motivated by a common set of questions.

Bottom line

Influence can be amplified by passion and distributed learning. These in turn can set into motion powerful increasing returns dynamics where, the more people who join in, the faster everyone learns. Traditional approaches to influence are diminishing returns games where we have to work harder and longer to get that next increment of participants to embrace our answers.

By focusing on questions rather than answers, showing vulnerability in the process and helping to connect people together in ever richer mesh networks, we have an opportunity to exercise influence far beyond our initial domains or resources. We can draw out the potential that resides within all of us so that even modest resources can quickly cascade into movements with ever increasing impact.  Small moves, smartly made, can indeed set very big things in motion. 

Resist the temptation to fall back on conventional approaches to influence that were more suited to a linear world. Step out to a promising edge and see what questions surface. Use these questions as a catalyst to pull in others who are excited by the opportunity to pursue these questions. You’ll be surprised at what you can accomplish.

Next steps

Ask the following questions:

• What are the two or three questions that most excite me and that have the potential to excite others?

• What have I done to make others aware of these questions and the potential impact that they might have?

• How could I become even more effective in reaching out to and mobilizing others in exploring these questions?

• Are there ways that I could help to connect these people with each other so that they can increase their own effectiveness in seeking answers?

The Big Shift in Business Strategy

Business strategy has evolved dramatically over the past four decades in response to the Big Shift that is re-shaping our global business landscape. We’re on the cusp of yet another shift that will determine who wins and who loses in the years ahead.

We’ve recently been exploring some key elements required to escape from the dark side of technology: passion, institutional innovation and movements shaped by narratives.

Today, we’ll look at the importance of new approaches to strategic advantage. These new approaches offer the potential to learn faster in ways that will be very difficult for others to copy. In a world of mounting performance pressure, this is a powerful advantage.

A brief history

Business strategy emerged in full force in the 1970’s and 1980’s with a strong focus on structural advantage.  The essence of structural advantage was simple: find barriers to entry that will protect a company from competition.  These barriers could take many forms: for example, geographic, economic, technological (patents) or regulatory. This made sense in a push based world: the key was to build walls to prevent others from pushing you out of your leadership position.

But here’s the problem.  The Big Shift is ultimately about the convergence of two powerful forces: digital technology infrastructures and long-term shifts in public policy towards economic liberalization. These two forces together are systematically and significantly reducing barriers to entry and barriers to movement on a global scale. The structural advantages that used to provide safe havens became less and less effective. If you’re an incumbent, welcome to the dark side!

In response to these developments, we saw a first big shift in strategic thinking, one that could be broadly framed as a transition from strategies of position to strategies of movement.  The key thrust was that, if you couldn’t rely on position to protect you, you had to focus on moving faster. Strategy was reduced to execution, hustle and adaptation.  Move more quickly and efficiently than anyone else and you could still stay ahead of the pack.

But this also has a problem.  The dark side of technology offers the trifecta of all challenges:

• increasing competitive intensity,
• accelerating change and
• growing uncertainty, often taking the form of extreme unanticipated events, sometimes known as “Black Swans” (per Nassim Nicholas Taleb). 

In that kind of environment, movement quickly becomes a treadmill that moves faster and faster and, when you least expect it, lurches to a stop and throws you against the wall.

Don’t get me wrong. Execution, hustle and adaptation are all necessary for survival. But movement alone, no matter how efficiently executed, may no longer be enough for us to escape the dark side of technology.  Instead, it may just suck us deeper and deeper into the abyss of the dark side.

So, what is to be done?  Perhaps it’s time to execute yet another shift in business strategy. One that helps us to harness the capabilities of the Big Shift to accomplish things that weren’t even possible before.

What would this new form of strategy look like? John Seely Brown and I started to reflect on this in some earlier writings here and here. But let me offer a brief update and synthesis here.

We now have an opportunity to take strategy to a new level, one that integrates position and movement in a profoundly new and powerful way.

The growing importance of position

Let’s start with position.  What if we expand our thinking about position?  In the past, position was all about protection – how do we build bigger and more secure barriers to hold off the hordes seeking to unseat us?

In the world of the Big Shift, the most valuable positions help us to influence events and achieve greater leverage by mobilizing the resources of others – we’re able to accomplish far more with a lot less. Let’s call these strategic positions “influence points”.  Control is less and less feasible in a turbulent world, but if we play our cards right, we might be able to significantly influence or shape the evolution of the world around us.  Through influence, we can motivate others to invest and act in ways that reinforce and amplify our own efforts.

The Big Shift is creating a much more richly connected world. Platforms of various types are making it easier for us to find and connect with each other on a global scale. Business networks and other kinds of business ecosystems are emerging on top of these platforms to help us move from short-term transactions to long-term relationships. And we’re able to scale these relationships in ways that draw in increasingly diverse participants from across the globe. Connections proliferate, but they don’t expand evenly.  They increasingly exhibit power laws where a few nodes concentrate an extraordinary number of connections and a very large number of nodes have very few connections.

Influence points tend to emerge whenever and wherever relationships begin to concentrate. Think about it.  In a world shaped by knowledge flows, you want to be at the intersection of as many flows as possible. These influence points bring some awesome advantages:

• By having privileged access to flows, you’re in a better position to anticipate what’s going to happen by seeing signals before anyone else does.
• By being in the middle of more flows, you have an opportunity to shape those flows in ways that can strengthen your position and give you important leverage in a world of mounting performance pressure. When you’re in the flow, small moves, smartly made, can indeed set very big things into motion.
• Third, by concentrating information and knowledge flows within a broader system, these influence points drive more rapid learning by offering privileged access to a growing and diverse set of information or knowledge flows.  In a turbulent world, this is perhaps the most significant advantage of all. If my firm or institution can learn faster than anyone else, it will have a significant advantage relative to those who are scrambling to catch up.

OK, now all of this can sound pretty abstract.  Let’s make this a little more concrete. We can explain a lot of the evolution of the personal computer industry by focusing on who established a leadership position in the key influence points of that device – the microprocessor and operating system components. Why were these such important influence points?  Because they shaped the functionality and options for all the developers of all the other components of the device. 

As a result, all the participants in the personal computer ecosystem had a strong motivation to connect with the owners of the leading microprocessor and the leading operating system – they were trying to anticipate how these components would evolve and what the implications might be for their own development efforts. The companies owning these two critical components became a concentration point for knowledge flows as more and more participants reached out to them and shared their own business plans. They had privileged access to knowledge flows that no one else could match.

What are some of the criteria for anticipating where these influence points might emerge? 

• First, they tend to provide significant and sustainable functionality to the broader platform or ecosystem. Again, think about the critical role that the operating system plays in the personal computer – almost all of the activity in the device is governed in one way or another by the functionality of the operating system. 
• Second, the functionality of these influence points tends to evolve rapidly over time – think once again about the evolution of the personal computer operating system. 
• Third, the influence point benefits from network effects that drive consolidation and concentration of participants at the influence point.  Lots of participants vied to provide operating systems for the personal computer but at the end of the day only one or two players remain in this space. 
• Finally, these influence points encourage fragmentation of the rest of the platform or ecosystem.  It’s not an accident that the operating system promoting both fragmentation of device manufacturers and application developers won the battle for the personal computer. This fragmentation of the rest of the system reinforces the advantage of the company occupying the influence point.

Influence points emerge and evolve by harnessing the power of pull. They attract more and more participants through the value they provide. Equally importantly, they pull participants to act by creating positive incentives that shape action.

But is this limited just to technology platforms? I don’t think so. I’ve spent a long time studying the structure and evolution of social networks and business ecosystems.  These systems also tend to develop influence points driven by the dynamics of the interactions and network effects.  As mentioned earlier, social networks and business ecosystems tend to develop power law profiles – a very few participants aggregate the largest number of interactions while there’s a “long tail” of participants with very few interactions.

Often, the organizer of an ecosystem or network becomes a natural aggregator of interactions because the organizer meets the four attributes of an influence point described above.  This isn’t to say that these ecosystems or networks are hub and spoke, where all interactions must pass through a central hub. But often a very large number of the total interactions concentrate at these points, often far more interactions than any other aggregation point.

So, position may once again become a significant source of competitive advantage.  But note that the value of the position has profoundly shifted from one of protection to one of leverage and learning.  Rather than trying to build walls, these positions seek to connect with others in ever richer ways in order to expand influence, leverage and learning.

Integrating movement into position

But position alone will not be sufficient to create lasting strategic advantage.  The key is to develop the capacity to move rapidly to reap the most benefit from influence, leverage and learning. Firms and other institutions need to cultivate the ability to participate in an expanding range of knowledge flows effectively.  They must also find ways to effectively filter through this expanding range of knowledge flows to extract the insights and approaches that have the potential to create the most value. Finally, they also need to quickly turn around and apply these insights and approaches both within their organization and across a broader range of participants in the system. In sum, the winners will be those who master the techniques required for scalable learning.

Ultimately, the true winners of these new strategies will not just be those who find ways to occupy influence points, but those who also are adept at building the only sustainable edge – the capability to learn faster by working effectively with others. By effectively combining position and movement, these players will be able to tap into the power of network effects, attracting more and more participants, drawn by the potential to learn faster.

So, strategies of movement have a prominent role to play but it’s a very different kind of movement.  Now, we’re not just talking about reacting and moving quickly. These are proactive strategies of movement – designed to strengthen influence points by harnessing their learning potential. If done right, it creates a powerful virtuous cycle – more effective learning attracts others and expands influence which in turn increases the potential for further learning.  To borrow a favorite phrase from my colleague, John Seely Brown, we trigger a generative dance between position and movement that takes us to unforeseen levels of impact.

Bottom line

We’re on the cusp of yet another fundamental shift in approaches to business strategy.  In the place of the raging battles that have occurred between advocates of strategies of position and strategies of movement, the Big Shift will reward those who can find effectively integrate new approaches to both position and movement.

In thinking about potential influence points that can focus these strategies, don’t just look at what exists today, but what could exist.  Often, the most powerful influence points are not yet in play but instead could emerge from a deep understanding of the unmet needs of participants and unexploited capabilities of new generations of technology.  If an influence point already exists, it’s likely to be occupied by incumbents that may be difficult to unseat.  It’s likely to be far more effective to identify and target influence points that haven’t yet emerged and to design shaping strategies that will help to coalesce these influence points.

I’m not by any means suggesting that all institutions must occupy influence points to be successful – that clearly would be an impossible task.  The good news is that you don’t need to occupy the influence point itself, but you do need to understand where the influence points are and find ways to connect to them so that you can learn faster as well and participate in the opportunities to expand value creation that come from leverage and learning.

Here are some key questions you should be asking and answering:

• Who occupies influence points today within my market or industry?
• What are potential new influence points that might emerge from the fundamental forces reshaping my market or industry?
• Who is working to build and occupy new influence points?
• Have I built robust relationships with these players?

If we shift our strategic focus to this new opportunity, we may indeed be able to craft strategies that help us to escape from the clutches of the dark side of technology.  But we may accomplish far more. We may become the catalysts for those collaboration curves that help us to unleash increasing returns opportunities. These increasing returns may ultimately benefit not only ourselves but many others.

One final thought – what if we applied this strategic notion of influence points and accelerated learning to our individual lives? How could we increase our personal impact?

What Is To Be Done (Part 3)

It’s fitting that we reach this third installment of my “What Is To Be Done?” series on Martin Luther King day.  He’s an icon of the power of narrative and its role in building movements that can fundamentally change how we live and work.  Narratives are a third key component in our quest to move beyond the dark side of technology. So far, I’ve highlighted the importance of both passion and institutional innovation in this quest, but these alone are unlikely to be sufficient in moving us to where we need to be.

What will motivate and sustain us as we connect more effectively to our passion and connect with each other to take on the task of institutional innovation?  One of the most powerful forces that will give us strength to pursue this path will be the opportunity-based narratives that have the potential to emerge as we begin to see the opportunity that lies ahead.

The power of narratives

I’ve written elsewhere about the distinction between stories and narratives.  Narratives are far more powerful than stories because they actively call for participation – they are open-ended, with the resolution hinging on the choices and actions that each of us will take in the days and years ahead. The outcome depends on us. What will we choose to do?

Why are opportunity- based narratives so powerful? There are many reasons.

• They excite the imagination – the future they paint is not fully formed, it’s only suggestive, leaving much to the imagination of the participants. 
• They call for action – it’s not sufficient to simply sit back and listen to the narrative – the outcome depends on us getting off our butts and joining the struggle despite significant challenges.  We begin to act upon our imagination, experimenting and exploring new approaches to achieving the opportunity framed by the narrative.
• They pull us out of our short-term thinking and expose us to a much more energizing long-term opportunity. We begin to make short-term sacrifices in order to participate in accomplishing something much more important. 
• They bring us together into collective action – we begin to see others who have embraced the narrative and share our desire to shape its outcome and we start to come together. We realize we’re not alone – there are others who are facing the same challenges. We can learn together how to overcome these challenges as well as draw comfort and reassurance from each other when we stumble along the way. Before we know it, we’ve come together in a movement.

Every successful movement throughout human history – whether political, religious or social – has been shaped and driven by a powerful narrative, one that invites participation by many and makes it clear that the outcome hinges on that participation. Stories can be used to reinforce narratives by showing us in very tangible form how individuals and groups successfully confronted challenges and enjoyed the rewards that came from taking initiative and being persistent.  But the over-arching narrative is ultimately what sustains and amplifies the impact of movements.

The American Narrative and the Civil Rights Narrative

One example of a successful narrative is the American Narrative – suggesting that there is a country where anyone, regardless of origins or wealth, can achieve great success. But this isn’t pre-destined – it requires each of us to make the choice to come to this land from wherever we are today and to make the effort required to achieve that success. Countless stories of individual success fed that narrative, but it was the narrative that motivated (and continues to motivate) a growing number from around the world to make the journey against great odds and build a new life for themselves.

Martin Luther King was a key contributor to framing a powerful narrative that built on the American Narrative but focused on the opportunity to include those who had been excluded by prejudice and segregation.  Here’s an excerpt from his powerful “I Have a Dream” speech:

And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." . . .

With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith, we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day. . . .

And when this happens, and when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual:

Free at last! Free at last!
Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!

Tying it back to passion and institutional innovation

So, how do narratives and movements connect back to the elements of passion and institutional innovation that I explored in my “What Is To Be Done” series?  Well, I’ve explored the role of narratives in catalyzing and amplifying the passion of the explorer in a previous posting. Three elements come together to define the passion of the explorer. 

• First, there’s a long term commitment to a domain.  Narratives help to cultivate this by focusing our attention on a long-term opportunity. 
• Second, there’s a questing disposition – an orientation towards seeking out new challenges as an opportunity to get to that next level of performance and impact.  Narratives foster this by inviting participation of each of us in overcoming the challenges that stand between us and the long-term opportunity that we can realize. 
• Finally, there’s a connecting disposition – an orientation towards finding and connecting with others who either share our passion or have relevant capability to help us address the challenges ahead. Narratives encourage this by making it clear that the opportunity is a broad-based one, addressable by many and urging us to join forces to increase the likelihood of success.

And how do narratives and movements connect with the element of institutional innovation? As I discussed in my previous post, institutional innovation for large, established institutions is very challenging – powerful antibodies will resist any effort at large scale organizational change. In this context, scaling edges is a promising approach that can dampen the effect of those antibodies. 

Opportunity based narratives help us in scaling edges because they focus us on opportunities. They help us to resist the temptation to focus on threats and directly confront the core of our institutions, something that will quickly mobilize the antibodies.  These narratives, by providing a compelling view of opportunities that can be shared by many, also can help to pull people from the core of the institutions out to the edges we are seeking to scale.  They also help us to identify and connect with people in other institutions who are driven by the same narrative. As a result, we can leverage our own efforts by going outside the institution rather than depending only on the resources within the institution.  As we come together in a broader movement shaped by a compelling narrative, we’ll find support and encouragement from like-minded individuals as we face the inevitable frustrations and even near-term defeats in our quest to transform massive institutions.

What’s needed now

What we need now is a new narrative, one that isn’t confined to a specific country, race or religion, but one that highlights the incredible opportunity created by digital technology infrastructures on a global scale that are continuing to evolve at an exponential rate. One that focuses on the ability of each of us to achieve far more of our potential than we ever would have imagined possible and the opportunity to achieve even more when we come together on a global scale to learn faster than we ever could on our own. One that is clear about the challenges we’ll face as we seek to address this opportunity, but one that is also compelling about the abundance that will result as we overcome these challenges. One that helps us to find each other as we begin to gather on the edges of existing institutions and gain support from each other across multiple edges in different institutions and different parts of the world as we embark on this amazing quest.

Such a narrative can’t be written up and published. Like any great narrative, it must be crafted.  “Craft” is an evocative term because it suggests that narratives are not just created on paper, but built through the actions that we begin to take as we start to see the opportunity ahead. Narratives emerge through action and interaction as we collectively begin to sense an opportunity and learn through action what it will take to achieve that opportunity.

Yes, there are those who will begin to give voice to the narrative and articulate the forces shaping the opportunity as well the forces that will seek to prevent us from achieving the opportunity.  This is something that Martin Luther King did so powerfully in the Civil Rights movement. It wasn’t an accident that he was a Baptist minister who was intimately familiar with the Christian narrative and the power it had to move people over millennia.

But no great narrative has had a single author or emerged overnight. In addition to Martin Luther King, a host of talented leaders like A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin and WEB DuBois emerged to drive the Civil Rights movement to success by helping to craft a collective narrative that spoke to a larger and larger portion of the population. They didn’t always agree with each other on tactics, but they were firmly united by a shared narrative that emerged from collective action and, in particular, from acts of enormous bravery by people like Claudette Colvin, Rosa Parks and James Meredith.

Narratives take time to take shape and acquire the texture that will make them compelling to potential participants. But, as they emerge and evolve, they can motivate us to do amazing things.  Many people (including Martin Luther King himself) gave up their lives to participate in the Civil Rights Narrative – the ultimate sacrifice that shows the incredible power of narratives.

At this point in time, we lack a shared narrative that can amplify our efforts to change the world.   A broad range of movements are in various stages of development – just think of such efforts as the maker movement, the open government movement, the unschooling movement, the singularity movement, the social entrepreneuring movement, the quantified-self movement and countless others. And then layer in a broad set of emergent efforts to mobilize change agents – for example, the Corporate Rebels United movement, the REX movement, the Stoos movement, and the thrivable movement, just to name a few. All of these efforts have lots of promise and potential, but they’re fragmented and have not yet found a way to come together around a shared view of the opportunity to accomplish something awesome.

Bottom line

So, what will it take to escape the dark side of the digital technology that's enveloping the world? Three things need to come together – individual passion, institutional innovation and opportunity-based narratives.  Without them, we’ll sink deeper and deeper into the dysfunctional world that can, and already is, being shaped by this technology.

We have an extraordinary opportunity to turn stress into abundance. But that opportunity is not inevitable.  Far from it.  There are growing forces on a global scale that are fearful of these new technologies and will do anything they can to bring the development and deployment of these technologies to a halt, all in the name of preserving what we have today.

The path we take from here will depend on each and every one of us. Will you fall prey to the dark side or will you help to do what’s necessary to truly harness the awesome potential of the technologies that we have brought into the world? The last thing we should do is become complacent, to take these benefits for granted. We need to renew our efforts to frame the opportunity ahead and to help all of us re-connect with the passion that we all had at an earlier point in our lives, but that most of us lost as we succumbed to the institutional imperative from our schools and our companies to fit in and get along.

The good news is that, if we choose to act, small moves, smartly made, can indeed set very big things in motion.

What Is To Be Done? (Part 2)

In my post last week, I made the case that we’ll only be able to overcome the dark side of technology by re-integrating passion and profession. But this is only the first step. If this is all we do, we’ll be doomed to lives of frustration and discontent.

Institutions as obstacles

Here’s the problem. We live in a world of institutions that were built in a different era – one that relentlessly sought to suppress passion in the name of predictability and efficiency. And when I say institutions, I mean all of our institutions – corporations, schools, NGO’s and government.

It’s no accident that only 11% of the US workforce is passionate about their work. This is a sign of great success. This is exactly what these institutions were designed to do – suppress passion. It starts with our schools that seek to prepare us for all the other institutional environments seeking people who can reliably follow instructions and execute in a predictable manner. Think of our current institutions as powerful chisels, relentlessly chipping away at our edges until we fit neatly into the tightly defined roles that our institutions have create.

If we’re fortunate enough to connect with our passion and find a way to pursue it professionally, our institutions will work tirelessly to put out the flame of passion and squeeze us back into the programmed roles that the institutions designed for us. We’ll find the passion slowly but inexorably squeezed out of us or we’ll find ourselves marginalized, forced to flee institutions (and the sad truth is we can never truly be free from the institutions that shape the society around us) or hiding on the edges of institutions that treat us with suspicion and disdain.

Taking innovation to a higher level

If we truly want our passion to flourish, we’ll need to change all of this. We’ll need to be innovative at an entirely new level.  Rather than focusing narrowly on technology and product innovation, we’ll need to broaden our horizons and engage in institutional innovation, imagining and then crafting an entirely new set of institutional arrangements based on a fundamentally different rationale for institutions. We’ll need to begin the long march through our institutions and redesign all aspects of them from the ground up.

We need to challenge the most basic rationale for why we have institutions to begin with. Our existing institutions were built on a rationale of scalable efficiency. It was easier to coordinate and scale transactions if they occurred within a single institution, rather than spread across multiple institutions. And efficiency in relatively stable environments required predictability.  This in turn led to increasingly fine-tuned systems driven by standardization of work, tight specification of activities and tight integration of activities. Risk undermined predictability so these systems became very risk averse.

It’s no surprise that these systems sought to squash passion – passion leads people to take risks as they embark on new quests, passion drives experimentation and tinkering, and sometimes even bold leaps, that undermine tightly integrated systems, and passion drives people to connect in unexpected ways that are not carefully programmed in advance.

Passion drives us to learn faster in our never-ending quest to achieve higher levels of impact within our chosen domain.   But our institutions today are driven by scalable efficiency, not scalable learning. In fact, scalable efficiency (at least as traditionally defined) is profoundly hostile to scalable learning – how could anyone really learn in an environment that is highly risk averse, standardizes all activity and tightly specifies every step that must be taken?

What would institutions look like if their core rationale were scalable learning?  What if the reason we’ll come together in institutions in the future is that we’ll learn faster as participants in these institutions than we ever could on our own?  These are the questions that should focus and drive our efforts to craft a new set of institutional arrangements.

Scalable learning requires passion.  If we’re not truly driven to achieve more of our potential, we'll never learn as rapidly as those who are.  Rather than being optional, or worse, something to be viewed with suspicion, passion of all the participants becomes a pre-requisite for the success of the institution.

If we take this seriously, we'll have to re-think all aspects of our institutions, starting with a systematic redesign of our work environments to accelerate learning. We’ll need to design and deploy scalable pull platforms that can help all of us to draw out people and resources when we need them and where we need them to support our questing and connecting dispositions. The Power of Pull develops this opportunity much more fully.

It’s only in this kind of environment that our passion will find fertile ground to take root and truly blossom, enabling us to achieve more of our potential.  Without it, we’ll be relegated to the margins, viewed with suspicion and confronted on a daily basis with efforts to contain, if not extinguish, the passion that we have so carefully nurtured.

Getting from here to there

But, how do we create such institutional environments? Certainly part of the answer is to build entirely new institutions from the ground up. But does that mean that all is lost for our existing institutions? Not at all. Every institution, no matter how hard-wired and set in its ways has the capacity for change.
But it won’t be easy. We’ll need to resist the temptation to challenge our institutions head on and persuade them of the need to change. Our institutions have great strength, with powerful antibodies specifically designed to suppress any efforts to change them.

Rather than confronting the core, we’ll need to start on edges that have the potential to scale rapidly, driven by the exponential forces that our re-shaping our economy and society. By designing alternative institutional arrangements on the edge and harnessing the capabilities of new generations of digital technology, we’ll quickly be able to rapidly scale these edges and demonstrate the power of new institutional forms in drawing out the potential within all of us to achieve ever higher levels of performance.

Over time, we’ll be able to pull more and more of the people and resources from the core of our established institutions out to the edges as they rapidly scale. This is a much more promising approach to change than conventional efforts to push change into the core. Before we know it, the once-powerful cores will become increasingly marginalized and fade into irrelevance as the edges become the new cores of a very different set of institutions.

But why should institutions care?

OK, so far, I’ve made the case that we need institutional innovation to create environments that catalyze and amplify the passion that resides within all of us. That’s certainly important for us as individuals to overcome the dark side of technology. But what’s in it for the institutions?

In a world of mounting performance pressure, this is the only hope for institutions to survive and thrive. You see, the old model of scalable efficiency is irretrievably broken. What used to be highly efficient becomes hugely inefficient in a world marked by growing uncertainty and unanticipated disruptions. The paradox is that the only way to get scalable efficiency in our current and future business environment is precisely by shifting our focus to scalable learning and adopting a fundamentally different set of practices and institutional arrangements.

If institutions get this right, they’ll be able to tap into powerful collaboration curves where we'll learn faster, and achieve ever higher levels of performance, as more participants join in.  We’ll shift from institutions trapped by diminishing returns in performance to ones that finally are able to grow and thrive through increasing returns.

Bottom line

If we are to escape the dark side of technology, we need to do more than tap into the passion that resides within each of us.  We need to take on the difficult challenge of transforming our institutions to nurture our passion and amplify the impact of our actions. We need to transform institutions so that, rather than representing barriers to passion, they become catalysts and amplifiers of passion.

But we’ll never succeed if we try to take this on as isolated individuals. We need to come together in movements. This is a third piece to the puzzle. We’ll need it to support us on our journey from the dark side to the frontiers of opportunity created by the Big Shift. Stay tuned – there’s more to come.

What Is To Be Done? (Part 1)

My last post on The Dark Side of Technology definitely seems to have hit a responsive chord. Many of us see evidence of this dark side of technology every day in the world around us.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. The same digital technologies producing this dark side also have the potential to produce a world of unparalleled opportunity.  But the dark side is the default – if we choose to do nothing, the dark side will take hold in all of its dysfunctional potential. It is up to us to take the steps necessary to turn pressure into opportunity. So, what are those steps?

If we’re going to carve out an alternative path, it begins with us as individuals and then expands out into our institutions and broader social arenas. I’m going to explore three elements of this path – passion, institutional innovation and narrative – that will have to come together if we are to successfully navigate the Big Shift and harness the opportunity it creates. This blog post will focus on the first element – passion – and in subsequent blog posts I’ll layer in the other two elements.

Integrating passion and profession

First, we all have to find ways to more effectively integrate our passion and our profession.  Here’s the thing. If we aren’t truly passionate about our work, we’ll inevitably experience mounting performance pressure as a source of growing stress. That stress will ultimately consume us and marginalize us, until we finally drop out or drop dead. 

On the other hand, if we’re truly passionate about our work, that stress will turn into excitement – it’s an opportunity for us to test ourselves, to draw out more of our potential and to make an even bigger difference as we reach new levels of performance. We’ll begin to actively seek out the next challenge and not just wait for it to come to us. Passion is a powerful energy source that is not only self-renewing, it generates even more energy as the challenges multiply.

When I talk about passion, I’m referring to the passion of the explorer, a particularly powerful form of passion because it drives us to learn faster over an extended period of time. The passion of the explorer brings together three attributes.  First, there’s a long-term commitment to making an increasing difference over time in a specific domain, usually broadly defined.  This ensures that the learning is sustained and cumulative. Second, there’s a questing disposition – actively seeking out and pursuing new challenges as an opportunity to get to that next level of performance and impact.  This provides us with a never-ending supply of learning opportunities. Third, there’s a connecting disposition – an orientation to find and connect with others who either share our passion or who can help us to more effectively address the challenges you’re pursuing. This amplifies our ability to learn by drawing on diverse experiences and perspectives as we work collaboratively to come up with creative new approaches. These three attributes come together to create a powerful catalyst for learning to drive sustained extreme performance improvement.

Integrating our passion with our profession is no longer just optional, something that might be desirable if it happens.  It’s become an imperative if we want to continue to succeed in our professional life. We’ll increasingly be competing with those who are passionate about their work – wherever they might be in the world. No matter what our credentials or current skills might be, we’ll find ourselves at a growing disadvantage as others, driven by passion, learn faster than we ever will and achieve ever higher levels of performance. And let’s not forget those robots that are also learning faster and coming up from behind.

Integrating our passion and profession will be a huge challenge for most of us.  Based on recent research we’ve done, only 11% of the U.S. workforce truly is passionate about their work.  That leaves 89% of us exposed and vulnerable to the dark side.

We’ll need to do whatever it takes to find our passion if we don’t yet know what it might be, and then craft a way to earn a living from pursuing that passion. We’ll need to challenge and discard the belief many of us have that we’re not capable of passion. I’ll wager that even the most jaded and downtrodden of us can reach back into our memory banks and recover experiences where we truly connected with passion, even if only briefly. 

Many of us have safely hidden our passion and pursue it outside a work environment that is deeply suspect of, if not hostile to, passion. We’ll need to step back and find out how we can either pursue that passion in our current work or find a work environment that will provide us an outlet for that passion. Anything short of this will leave us deeply immersed in the dark side that is gathering force around us.

As we find our passion, the cognitive biases that blossom on the dark side will begin to recede. In their place, we’ll find ourselves looking at the world through new (and much more productive) lenses.  We’ll begin to be more motivated by perceived rewards and discount the perceived risks along the way. Our time horizons will lengthen and we’ll become much more proactive, able to resist the distractions that bombard us minute by minute, as we stay focused on the longer term opportunities ahead. We’ll also embrace a positive sum view of the world, one where we will create more value by working together and the real question is how much value can we create rather than how much value we can carve out for ourselves. We’ll find it much easier to build trust and work collaboratively with others who share our passion, secure in the knowledge that we’ll make an even bigger difference by working together. We’ll still compete in an effort to discover the most productive approaches to dealing with the challenges we face, but we’ll find that collaboration is ultimately the most powerful form of competition.

As we connect with this passion, something interesting will happen – we’ll increasingly shed the masculine archetype that dominates our society today and embrace the feminine archetype that helps us to more effectively pursue the passion of the explorer.

Bottom line

Passion is the key starting point in our journey from the dark side to the frontiers of opportunity created by the Big Shift.  Before we seek to change the world, we first have to find a way to change ourselves.  There’s much to be done to create a world that can help us to achieve more of our potential.

But let’s not get distracted. If we’re not connecting with and nurturing our passion first and foremost, we won’t have what it takes to change a world that is deeply entrenched in outmoded institutions and practices.

Let me be clear, passion alone will not save us from the dark side. Virtually all of our institutions today are explicitly designed to squash passion and squeeze us into the molds that have been carefully programmed for each of us. These institutions will do everything they can to weaken and disillusion us.

But if we are able to connect with our passion, it will energize and sustain us on the long road ahead. It’s a powerful antidote to the pressures gathering force on the dark side. So, what’s your passion and is it an integral part of your work?

The Dark Side of Technology

I’m going to disrupt the Silicon Valley script. You know the one.  Every talk or article coming out of Silicon Valley follows the prescribed template: start with a dazzling description of awesome new digital technologies and then proceed to explore all the wonderful benefits and opportunities that these technologies will bring to us.

I’m going to do something different.  I want to explore the dark side of these technologies.  The side that very few tech evangelists want to acknowledge, much less talk about.

What do I mean? It’s the fact that all of these amazing digital technologies are coming together to create a world of mounting performance pressure for all of us, one where the performance pressure will continue to grow and expand on a global basis for the foreseeable future, rather than plateau and recede. Let me repeat: this pressure is not going away. Far from it. It will continue to intensify. If we make the mistake of standing still, we will fall farther and farther behind.

But that’s just the beginning.  It’s not just that performance pressure is relentlessly growing for all of us.  The combined impact of all of these technologies also accelerates the pace of change, making it more and more challenging for us to get to that next level of performance in a shorter and shorter period of time.

But there’s more. It wouldn’t be so bad if the pace of change was accelerating along some completely predictable path.  These digital technologies are also increasing uncertainty – we are more and more vulnerable to extreme events, Taleb’s “black swans”, that come out of nowhere, gather enormous force very quickly through a global network of connections, and disrupt all of our carefully laid plans, our carefully compiled knowledge bases and our comfort levels.

Put it all together and it spells out a growing challenge. How do we keep up? How do we learn faster? How do we prepare ourselves for the cascades of unexpected events coming our way? How do we avoid mounting anxiety and the looming risk of marginalization and burn-out?

I don’t mean to deny the incredible benefits that all these technologies are bringing us.  There’s a delicious paradox here: the very same technologies that bring us awesome opportunity and new possibilities are at the very same time bringing us mounting performance pressure, accelerating change and growing uncertainty. To truly harness these opportunities, we first need to acknowledge and deal with the dark side.

The forces at work

Digital technologies are coming together into global technology infrastructures that straddle the globe and reach an ever expanding portion of the population. In economic terms, these infrastructures systematically and substantially reduce barriers to entry and barriers to movement on a global scale.  They make it far easier for any of us to reach anyone else around the world and to offer our goods and services wherever they might be needed. So, whatever position you have achieved today, watch out. There’s that person or company that you never heard of who is putting together a plan to take your customer away from you.

These infrastructures are also increasing the volume, variety and richness of connections. One effect of this is to accelerate the pace of change – information flows at a faster and faster pace to more and more nodes, making it possible for all of us to see things faster and to change our actions more quickly than ever before.  As anyone who understands complexity theory knows, the more connected we become, the more vulnerable the system becomes to cascades of information and action that can disrupt the system in unexpected ways.

But here’s the kicker.  This digital technology infrastructure is not stabilizing.  We’ve had plenty of technology disruptions throughout history – the steam engine, electricity, the telephone, just to name some.  But, as Carlotta Perez has shown, all of these disruptions followed a common pattern.  They began with a burst of innovation at the technology level, but then quickly stabilized with only incremental performance improvements afterwards.  That in turn led to a burst of innovation at the infrastructure level, figuring out how to most effectively organize and deliver the value of this technology to business and society. But then that too rapidly stabilized so we could then figure out how to most effectively harness this technology.

Our digital technology infrastructure is unprecedented in human history.  It’s not stabilizing.  The core technology components – computing, storage and bandwidth – are continuing to improve in price/performance at accelerating rates and the best scientists and technologists suggest that this exponential pace will not slow down in the foreseeable future.

And the power and scope of impact of these technologies is amplified by their interaction with each other and their ability to accelerate the performance improvement of an expanding array of other technologies, ranging from genomics to nanotechnology.  Singularity University has led the way in exploring these technology advances and interactions and a recent working paper that I co-authored suggests that the biggest risk is to continue to view these technologies in isolated siloes. 

So, whatever performance pressure, pace of change and uncertainty we're experiencing today is just going to intensify in the years ahead as the infrastructures become ever more powerful. more diversified and accessible to more and more people.

Impact at individual and institutional levels

To be clear, we experience this mounting performance pressure at both an individual and institutional level. At the individual level, one compelling indicator is a billboard that reads: “How does it feel to know that there are at least one million people around the world that can do your job?” The message is clear: no matter what your credentials or experience, you are increasingly competing with a lot of other smart and motivated people on a global scale and you can’t become complacent about your current position.

At an institutional level, the best indicator of mounting performance pressure is the analysis that we did in the Shift Index tracking the performance of all public companies in the US from 1965 to 2012.  As measured in terms of return on assets, performance has plummeted – it has declined by over 75%. There is no sign of it leveling off and certainly no sign of it turning around. It’s not just that competitive intensity is increasing – it’s also about the increasing mismatch between the non-linear world emerging around us and the linear institutions, practices and mindsets we continue to hold on to.

Many executives are fond of comparing themselves to the Red Queen. You know the story: she ran faster and faster just to stay in the same place.  But she actually had it pretty good – she ran faster and faster and managed to stay in the same place. We’re running faster and faster and falling farther and farther behind.

The insidious impact

All of this mounting pressure has an understandable but very dangerous consequence.  It draws out and intensifies certain cognitive biases that I’ve written about elsewhere so I’ll just briefly summarize them here:

• They magnify our perception of risk and discount our perception of reward
• They shrink our time horizons
• They foster a more and more reactive approach to the world (one of the key reasons for the dysfunctional use of technology so graphically described in Sherry Turkle's Alone Together)
• They lead us to adopt a zero sum view of the world – if you win, I will lose
• They erode our ability to trust anyone or any institution

As I’ve also written elsewhere, these cognitive biases also help to reinforce the masculine archetype. This is war and if you’re not macho enough to engage in battle, stand back and let the real men run the show. The feminine archetype is banished to the bedroom and the kitchen.

The combined effect of these cognitive biases increases the temptation to use these new digital infrastructures in a dysfunctional way: surveillance and control in all aspects of our economic, social and political life. Our corporate leaders embrace new technologies that offer the promise of being able to track worker activities and output in real time and in ever more fine grained detail. It also motivates employers to accelerate the process of automation: machines cost less to maintain and they’re far more predictable.

Ultimately, these cognitive biases significantly increase the likelihood of an economic, social and political backlash, driven by an unholy alliance between those who have power today and those who have achieved some modest degree of income and success.  Both of these segments will feel profoundly threatened by these new technology infrastructures and deeply fearful of their impact in undermining their current position. Those in power will harness the growing fear and frustration of broader segments of the population that desperately want to hold on to the little that they have already accumulated.

Such a backlash would be a tragedy of global proportions.  It would mean that our ability to tap into the incredible opportunity that these new technologies offer would come to an end. All of us as customers and as human beings have the opportunity to experience unparalleled and ever expanding well-being enabled by these technologies. But the backlash would push us back into our assigned roles and likely generate friction and war on a global scale that would significantly expand human suffering.

What is to be done?

Yikes! This is a pretty bleak picture I’m painting. Fasten your safety belt, this is going to be a very bumpy ride.

But I’m an optimist. What am I doing constructing such a bleak view of the world? Because I believe that, until we face the reality of what is happening around us, we will not take the steps necessary to harness these technologies to create a very different kind of world, one that turns pressure into opportunity and stress into success.

What are those steps? I’ll lay out an alternative, much more exciting, path in my next blog post but, for now, let’s just really absorb the dark side of technology – understand it, feel it, acknowledge it and confront it. It’s there. It won’t go away. If we truly embrace that, we’ll be more ready to take the difficult steps required to turn this all around.

Not So Grand Narratives

Narrative is a powerful concept with enormous potential. But it’s also fraught with misunderstanding because of the many different meanings attached to the term. By unpacking those different meanings, leaders of institutions and movements can begin to better understand the power of narratives.

Recently, I’ve tried to establish a distinction between story and narrative here and here. For most people, story and narrative are used interchangeably. But others, particularly in the academic world, have a very specific meaning they attach to narrative, although they usually refer to it as “Grand Narrative” or “meta-narrative.”  It may help to explore why I don’t regard these as narratives.

The concept of "Grand Narrative"

First, let’s explore what this version of narrative is meant to describe. The term “Grand Narrative” was coined by Jean Francois Lyotard in his 1979 book The Postmodern Condition but it has subsequently been embraced by many in the post-modernist movement.  Lyotard was referring to the efforts by ruling elites to explain how the status quo had evolved and, in the process, to rationalize why the status quo was destined to emerge and needed to be embraced.

An example of this kind of Grand Narrative would be the view widely held in the 18th and 19th centuries, and even well into the 20th century, that Western society was driven by a civilizing mission as it expanded into other parts of the world – “primitive” societies needed the West to occupy and transform them so that they too could savor the benefits of Western culture.

Russia’s leaders, following the Bolshevik revolution, developed a very different kind of Grand Narrative. It explained that Russia had emerged as a staging ground for a global communist revolution and that its draconian domestic policies were needed to mobilize the resources required to spread the revolution far and wide.

"Grand Narratives" are really stories

These Grand Narratives are much more like stories than like narratives as I have described them. They are descriptive and explanatory – they establish causal connections across a series of events to show how certain outcomes came to be and, indeed, were inevitable.  They often contain quite a bit of drama in the sense of people encountering and overcoming challenges to get to where they are today but the resolution is pre-determined. 

These Grand Narratives are about the people who got us to where we are today – they’re not about you, the audience. If you have any role to play, it’s simply to fit into the pre-ordained order of things and play the assigned role that has already been scripted. More often than not, your role is simply to accept the inevitability of the status quo. These Grand Narratives become a powerful way to indoctrinate and suppress independent thinking in favor of conformity and passivity.

These Grand Narratives thus have the attributes of stories as I’ve defined them: they have a resolution that is pre-ordained (even if it hasn’t fully played out yet) and they’re about others, they’re not about you. They’re stories masquerading as narratives.

OK, is this just a semantic distinction that doesn't really matter? Let me make the case that it makes a big difference that matters alot.

The power of opportunity based narratives

Narratives as I’ve defined them are quite different. They’re open-ended – the resolution is yet to be determined and the resolution hinges on choices and actions that you make. It’s ultimately about you. It highlights possibility rather than certainty. It’s future oriented rather than looking backward and trying to explain what has already happened. 

Narratives are designed to intrigue, excite and motivate people to act, especially if they’re opportunity based narratives.

These narratives intrigue and excite by only partially revealing an opportunity ahead. They don’t pretend to have a comprehensive view of the opportunity – instead, it’s very clear that the full dimensions of the opportunity are yet to be determined.  But the opportunity as partially revealed is an awesome one with great potential to make us better human beings and give us a much more satisfying life. It invites participants to use their imagination to explore what that opportunity might look like. A recent article on brain science suggests that this appeal to the imagination can be a powerful vehicle to motivate us to delay gratification, take more risks and go on a quest that will take time and effort to pursue.

But narratives do more than excite the imagination. It’s not just about imagining an opportunity – it’s about making choices and taking action to achieve that opportunity. Opportunity based narratives move us from passive acceptance to action.  They help us to re-discover our agency – our capacity to act and make a difference in the world.

The search for stability

In a time of accelerating change and growing uncertainty, we all have a natural human desire to seek stability.  “Grand Narratives” can be very reassuring because they help us to make sense of an increasingly confusing and complex world. But at the same time, they cultivate complacency, making us think that we have things figured out, when in fact we are increasingly likely to be blindsided by some black swan coming at us out of nowhere. 

Opportunity based narratives take a different approach to stability.  Rather than providing the stability of an answer, they provide the stability of an exciting question for us to pursue.  They help us to focus in a time of great distraction. They reassure us that, if we stay focused on the core question posed by the narrative, we’ll acquire new insight and tap into potential that we didn’t even know existed. They in fact help us to resist the urge to explain with the knowledge we have today and instead highlight the opportunity and need to develop new knowledge.

In fact, at some basic level, opportunity based narratives are profoundly hostile to “Grand Narratives.” “Grand Narratives” seek to reassure us that we have all the relevant answers and that the only challenge is to understand and accept the explanations embedded in the narrative. They carve out a comfort zone and invite us to relax in it.  Opportunity based narratives disrupt the status quo with questions that have not yet been answered and emerging opportunities that have not yet been achieved. They call us to leave our comfort zone and embark on a quest that will surely be challenging but also very rewarding.

Bottom line

So, why does this distinction matter to people in business? It can all sound pretty abstract and theoretical, far removed from the day to day practicality of running a business.

In fact, this distinction is central to how we run our business.  In a world of scalable efficiency, we feel an urgency for answers, for ways to understand the world around us so that we can more effectively predict what will happen next. That’s why, when executives begin to pursue the power of narratives, they have a tendency to embrace “Grand Narratives.” You know the kind – “let me explain who we are, how we came to be and why we are an inevitable product of the world around us.”

As the Big Shift drives us into a world of scalable learning, opportunity based narratives can help us mobilize a much broader group of participants on a set of questions and opportunities so that we can all learn faster by working together. This kind of narrative is rarely used in business today. Those who master this form of narrative have the potential to create significant advantage by accelerating learning while at the same time differentiating themselves from companies still mired in self-important “Grand Narratives.”

This is just the beginning. In a forthcoming post, I’ll pursue the question of why opportunity based narratives are becoming central to business success. In the meantime, let me know what you think. Does this distinction make sense? Does it matter?

Narrative and Passion

Narrative and passion are becoming increasingly central to performance at all levels – individual, institution and ecosystem.  But are they completely separate topics or are they related in some way? I believe they’re deeply related and that, together, they amplify performance improvement in powerful ways.  Let me explain.

Let’s get definitions out of the way

Narrative and passion are terms that are widely and loosely used.  I’ll start by clarifying what I mean by them.

For me, narratives are related to, but different from, stories.  Stories are self-contained – they have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Narratives on the other hand are open-ended – the outcome is unresolved, yet to be determined.  Stories are also about me, the story-teller, or other people; they’re not about you.  In contrast, the resolution of narratives depends on the choice you make and the actions you take – you will determine the outcome and you are therefore an integral part of the narrative.

Passion, on the other hand, comes in many different forms.  My focus here is on what I call the passion of the explorer. 

This form of passion, most often found in arenas where there is sustained extreme performance improvement, has three primary attributes. First, there’s a long-term commitment to a specific domain. The commitment is not just to learn about the domain, but to make an increasing difference in that domain. The other two attributes are dispositions – orientations to take action in specific contexts.  There’s a questing disposition – a tendency to seek out new challenges, to become excited by them as opportunities to get to that next level of performance and to want to move on to a new challenge as soon as one challenge has been successfully addressed. And then there’s also a connecting disposition – a tendency to seek out and work with anyone who can be helpful in addressing the challenges that are on the horizon. 

OK, but how are narratives and passion related?  Here’s the thing – narratives create the conditions that catalyze and draw out the three attributes that define the passion of the explorer.

Long-term commitment to a domain

Let’s take it one step at a time.  Narratives are typically about a broad domain rather than narrow slices of experience.  Think about famous social narratives like the Christian narrative, the American narrative or the Silicon Valley narrative. I’ve talked about institutional narratives like the Apple narrative or the Nike narrative – the former is about the role of technology in re-shaping our identity in society while the latter is about our ability to move from passive observers of sports to active participants in achieving exciting new levels of physical performance. Whatever the level of the narrative, it maps out a broad domain. And, because it calls us to make choices and take action, it helps us to move beyond simple curiosity to a commitment to make a difference.

But it does more than that, especially if it’s an opportunity based narrative.  It identifies wonderful opportunities within that domain that are available to each and every one of us if we choose to pursue them. Narratives can help orient us towards a specific domain and encourage us to make a long-term commitment to that domain because of the exciting opportunity that awaits us there. But, it’s up to us. Will we make that commitment? Will we take the actions required to participate in that opportunity?

Nurturing a questing disposition

Now, let’s look at questing dispositions.  Opportunity based narratives are not just about opportunities – they also typically frame the challenges that we’ll encounter along the way. It’s not going to be easy. To participate in the long-term opportunity, you need to take on and overcome the challenges that await you. 

The dual focus on opportunity and challenges helps to draw out the questing disposition in us. Rather than trying to avoid challenges when they occur, narratives encourage us to seek out the challenges because we won’t be able to participate in the long-term opportunity until and unless we confront and overcome the challenges that stand between us and the opportunity.

Fostering a connecting disposition

And what about the connecting disposition?  Narratives tell us that the opportunity ahead is not just for one individual; it’s available to many if not all of us. We’re not alone in this. These are not zero sum opportunities where one winner crowds out all of the others.  We can all participate in the opportunity. That message encourages us to come together to help each other over the finish line.

The dissemination of the narrative itself helps to build up a community – or dare I say a movement? – of participants who share a common excitement about overcoming the challenges that await on the way to a big and transformative opportunity. It cultivates a larger and larger gathering of people who are united by a shared commitment to a domain and an eagerness to confront and overcome the challenges ahead. As we see more and more people who share our excitement, we are much more likely to reach out and collaborate with others in overcoming the challenges ahead.

The virtuous cycle between narrative and passion

So, opportunity- based narratives can be very powerful in catalyzing and amplifying the passion of the explorer. But there’s also a virtuous cycle here.  As participants begin to acquire this passion of the explorer, they accomplish awesome things. The stories of their amazing accomplishments begin to spread and give additional credibility to the broader narrative – look at what others have accomplished, you can do the same or even better.  Will you join us? Will you make the choices and take the actions required to pursue this exciting opportunity? The narrative is enriched by the experiences of others, spreads more broadly as others see the tangible evidence of what can be accomplished and acquires far more credibility.

Narratives as beacons

Now, not all of us will be drawn equally to any particular narrative. But narratives can become bright beacons calling us to reflect on whether the opportunity being framed is one that is meaningful to us as individuals. They are powerful antidotes to the institutions and practices we have today that discourage and ultimately squash passion in their quest for predictability, standardization and tight specification of all the actions we must take. They call us to re-connect with the passion we all felt as children and to move from the passion of the player that most of us had as kids to the passion of the explorer, motivating us to make a long-term commitment to a specific domain.

The dark side of narratives

Let me hasten to add that there’s a dark side to narratives.  So far, I’ve been talking about opportunity based narratives.  There’s another kind of narrative – threat based narratives. You know the kind – we’re increasingly surrounded by them.  These narratives focus on an imminent threat – we’re under attack and if we don’t band together now, we’re all going to die or at least all the things we hold precious are going to disappear. Threat-based narratives are deeply conservative or even reactionary – they want to preserve what we have rather than explore exciting new opportunities.

These kinds of narratives tend to ignite a different form of passion – the passion of the true believer. In this kind of passion, the destination is very clear and the path we all need to take to reach that destination is tightly mapped out. In contrast, the passion of the explorer has no idea what the ultimately destination will be much less the path that we will need to pursue to reach that destination – the key is simply to get started and to craft our own path with the help of others.

Threat-based narratives and the passion of the true believer have combined throughout history to create many of the social movements that have wreaked havoc in our world. Nevertheless, even here the tight connection of narrative and passion helps to explain the power that these movements have exhibited.

Bottom line

Why does all of this matter? As I’ve explored in the Big Shift, we live in a world of mounting performance pressure – it’s not going away.  In that kind of world, we need to find ways to draw out sustained extreme performance improvement.  We simply cannot do that without deep and widespread passion, as I’ve argued elsewhere. The problem is that, based on our recent research into passion levels within the workforce, only 11% of the US workforce has passion about the work they do. If I’m right, narratives can play a key role in drawing out passion, both within each of us and within our institutions.

If we can’t find ways to re-connect with our passion as individuals, we’ll continue to feel mounting stress, become more and more marginalized and ultimately burn out and drop out.  If we can’t find ways as institutions to tap into the passion of our participants, we’ll experience diminishing performance and ultimately topple out of existence.

It doesn’t have to be that way.  Narratives can create a very different world, one where pressure evolves from a source of stress to a source of excitement, calling us to achieve even more of our potential, both as individuals and collectively. By drawing out the passion that lies dormant within most of us, narratives can help us to accomplish things that we would have never believed possible.

Some Further Thoughts on Corporate Narratives

Last week, I posted a blog exploring the power of corporate narratives while challenging what most people view as a corporate narrative. This was only the latest installment in my continuing exploration of narratives that began with an earlier blog posting and a talk that I gave earlier this year at SXSW.

At its core, I'm trying to draw a distinction between “stories” and “narratives” as I define them. From my perspective, stories are self-contained – they have a beginning, a middle and an end. Narratives on the other hand are open-ended – the outcome is unresolved, yet to be determined.  Stories are also about me, the story-teller, or other people; they are not about you.  In contrast, the resolution of narratives depends on the choice you make and the actions you take – you will determine the outcome and you are therefore an integral part of the narrative.

This latest blog posting has triggered a lot of response – most of it very positive but also some strong criticism. I thank all those who have embraced my perspective, but I’d like to take a moment to address some of the key elements of the criticism I’ve received, because it reflects some serious misunderstandings and responding may help to clarify my message.

Stories versus narratives?

First, the most common criticism is that I am somehow recommending abandoning stories or “taking stories out of narratives.” Nothing could be further from the truth.  I'm a strong proponent of stories and their ability to engage and deepen understanding.  I simply believe that narratives, as I've defined them, have even greater power to engage, deepen understanding and, most importantly, motivate action.

But this is not an either/or proposition.  Stories play a key role in helping to make narratives more tangible, believable and relevant in very diverse contexts.  Narratives, on the other hand, can help to draw connections across stories and link them to a much broader series of events. Narratives also make clearer to the listeners what they can and need to do in order to achieve the potential outlined by the narrative. I strongly believe that stories and narratives not only can and should co-exist, but they in fact amplify and reinforce each other in powerful ways.

Narratives as a connected set of related events

At least some of this misunderstanding stems from my somewhat abbreviated summary (this is a blog after all, not an essay or book) of the corporate narratives communicated by Apple and Nike. A number of people have commented that my rendition of these narratives seemed more like a set of beliefs or a mental model rather than a “connected set of related events.”  Both of these narratives in fact capture an important connected set of related events and it was my fault for not rendering this more explicitly.

Let me try to illustrate with an enhanced rendition of the Apple narrative as I understand it. Here it is:

The earliest generation of computers came into society [Event 1] and transformed the way we run our institutions. [Event 2] But, in the process, they also reinforced the grip of mass society on all of us as individuals, converting us into numbers to be processed by mainframes so that we can be more easily manipulated by those who run the computers [Event 3]. Now, we have a new generation of computers and related technology [Event 4] that provides us for the first time with tools that we can individually use to free ourselves from the constraints and pressures to fit into mass society and that allow us to express our unique individuality and achieve more of our potential [Event 5].  But, this outcome is not a given; it requires each of us to “think different” – will you “think different”? [Possible Event 6 to infinity]. Now, I may be wrong, but to me this is a connected set of relevant events that speaks to all of us.

Yes, there are beliefs and perhaps even a mental model buried in this narrative but I suspect there are beliefs and mental models buried in all engaging stories or narratives.  I don’t think the presence of beliefs or mental models diminishes a narrative.

A key point about this narrative that I tried to underscore in my earlier posting is that it's not about Apple – it's about us and the challenges and opportunities created by new generations of technology. Of course, Apple has a role to play in the unfolding of the narrative, but the narrative is about what new generations of technology mean for us and the choices we increasingly will need to make to harness the potential of this technology. Even some of the folks who have supported my view of narratives tend to fall back to old ways when giving examples of corporate narratives – the narratives are much more about the company, rather than about us.

Narratives and slogans

Someone also made the claim that narratives can’t be condensed into slogans. I beg to differ – “think different” admirably captures the much richer narrative of Apple. Of course, it can never replace the narrative, but slogans can be a great way to get to the essence of a narrative, especially the call to action.

The goodness of narratives

One critic commented that there's nothing intrinsically good about narratives – that there are many dysfunctional and debilitating narratives.  Point well taken but, again, I don’t think I ever made the case that all narratives are good.  I simply am trying to make the case that narratives are a powerful tool to inspire action and participation.  Like any powerful tool, narratives can be used for good or evil.

What is a story anyway?

Others have challenged my effort to characterize stories as self-contained with a beginning, middle and an end and as being about a story-teller or other people, not about you.  The push back appears to be that these are not really stories, that really well-crafted stories are open-ended and about you.  Well, if they’re not stories, what are they?  I have to say that virtually all the stories I’ve heard have these two characteristics.  To simply say these are not “true” stories seems a bit disingenuous. 

Bottom line

I still believe there’s a powerful distinction to be made between stories and narratives as I’ve defined them and that we diminish our impact by just focusing on stories.  At the end of the day, we can disagree on semantics and what to call the two entities that I’m describing – perhaps there are better terms, but I’ve not yet heard anyone suggest viable alternatives. Call them "bloop" and "bleep" for all I care. My key point is that, whatever we call them, we need to pay attention to the distinction. As an optimist, I’d like to be believe that many of my “critics” would embrace my perspective if I can further clarify misunderstandings that give the impression of disagreement.

I’ll be exploring the power of narratives more fully in postings ahead and I look to all of you to challenge me and encourage me to elaborate where I may not be clear. Together, we can do amazing things.