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Revolution from the Edge

What fills you with wonder? What do you wonder about? These different, but related questions were posed often during the TED event last week.  The annual TED event that I attended was organized around the broad theme of the rediscovery of wonder.

As always, TED catalyzed deep thinking and deep emotion as I navigated through awesome sessions and stimulating conversations lasting late into the night. Before too much time passes, I want to step back and reflect on what fills me with wonder. It was only peripherally addressed in the TED sessions, but like many catalysts it helped to coalesce and amplify some thoughts that have been coming together over the past couple of months.

I am filled with wonder by many things, but in recent days I have been especially awed by the revolution that is taking shape before our very eyes.  It has been gathering force for quite some time but it began to erupt in a serious way with the intensifying turmoil in the Middle East.  Most people observing these events from the outside have been guardedly optimistic that these revolutions will be a peaceful force for change in the Middle East.

They seriously under-estimate what is going on. We are witnessing one dimension of the Big Shift that will shake and shape our world in ways that we can only begin to imagine.

The convergence of edges

How to describe this dimension of the Big Shift? It is the convergence of multiple edges, erupting with a force that will be felt in the most distant parts of our globe. What do I mean? The force of this eruption is shaped by three edges coming together: geographic, generational and technological.

• The Middle East and North Africa is a geographic edge defined by the intersection of three continents. In economic terms, this region is part of the developing economies operating on the edge of more developed economies.

• This region containing a large and very rapidly growing concentration of a well educated younger generation – a generational edge. These young people has been systematically excluded from meaningful jobs capable of developing their talents. Growing unemployment rates within the younger generation have been the catalyst to set the movement in motion.

• That younger generation has embraced new technological edges – especially the Internet and online social networks – to connect in ways that had not been feasible before, not just within their individual countries, but across the region. They have shared news and inspiration in ways that gave them the courage to proceed and helped them to focus the attention of the rest of the world on their quest.

It is an explosive convergence. One of the many things about it that fill me with wonder is that so far has been playing out with minimal violence from the youth movement.  They are simply gathering in ever larger numbers to demand an end to regimes that have blocked them from expressing themselves and from pursuing meaningful work. Their example of conviction, courage and commitment has pulled others into the streets and squares, not just in their own countries but in a spreading ring of countries in the region.

Why the youth?

Who knows how far this will spread in the short-term? It may not spread too widely at the outset as leaders of a growing range of countries mobilize around a pincer movement of military deployments and “reforms” to try to preempt similar uprisings.  But this I know. In the long-term, this movement will prevail, catalyzing cascades of change in countries occupying the geographic edge and ultimately spreading into the core of the developed economies.

So, what gives this movement the power to prevail in the long-term in the face of military forces that seek to preserve the status quo?  Well, let’s start with the fact that these military forces largely consist of a younger generation who share the same frustrations of their brothers and sisters (sometimes literally) facing them in the streets and squares. And then let’s add in the growing confidence that comes with the demonstrated ability to make change happen.

But those are not the real reasons. This movement is giving voice to something that is profoundly global. You see, the older generation that I belong to has systematically opted for limited, short-term benefits at the expense of sustainable, long-term growth and prosperity.  We have done this in multiple ways that, in aggregate, have put up global barriers to progress for the younger generation.  These barriers include

• Widespread corruption
• Rapidly mounting government debt
• Environmental degradation that generates increasingly harmful long-term effects

Now, the relative importance of these barriers differs depending on the part of the world we are in.  As a broad generalization, youth in the developing economies suffer most from the first two barriers while the youth from developed economies feel the effect of the last two barriers the most. The youth in natural resource rich countries around the world confront the first and third barriers most severely. But wherever we are in the world, these conditions are not sustainable.

To put it in Marxist terms (and, no, I am not a Marxist, or even a Hegelian), the subjective conditions are aligning with the objective conditions.  Youth, led by those in the Middle East, are beginning to wake up to the realization that they are inheriting a world that is simply not sustainable. When subjective conditions align with objective conditions, revolution generally ensues. And, if I am right about the global presence of objective conditions, the revolution will eventually spread as younger generations around the world wake up to the lack of sustainability in every country.

The agenda for change

The spreading youth-driven revolution will have three agenda items:

• The first item on their agenda will be to confront and oppose the obstacles to sustainability that have been put in their way by the older generation.

• But in order to do that, they will have to embark on a more positive journey – an effort to re-think all of our institutions through the lens of talent development.  If we took seriously the priority of accelerating talent development and realized that education and training programs are only a small part of the answer, how would all of our institutions need to change to become platforms for talent development?  What would corporations, schools, NGO’s and government agencies look like? What would be required to foster a new culture of learning?

• And that leads to a third item, how would we re-think public policy – all public policy, not just education – through the lens of talent development?  What public policies would we adopt in areas like immigration, trade, financial regulation, intellectual property, etc. if our goal were really to accelerate talent development?

Few, if any, of the youth rebels in the Middle East are explicitly focused at this point on the broader issue of talent development. They have more immediate obstacles to address.  But this is the natural issue for youth – they have the most to gain from talent development – and the most to lose if they simply have to fall back on what they learned in school. The world is changing too rapidly to compress learning into a few years of prescribed courses that will barely prepare them for the world of today, much less the world of tomorrow. With most of their lives ahead of them, they will be the most at risk if they don’t address these needs quickly and effectively.

Accelerated talent development will also be required to effectively overcome the enormous burdens that our generation has placed upon the shoulders of the younger generation. These are global and complex issues – wicked problems.  The younger generation has no hope of resolving them if they do not come together and collectively focus on talent development. They need to get better faster by working together.

The deep forces driving the revolution

This revolution is taking shape on the edge.  That is where all true revolutions begin.  It is easy to dismiss or diminish in importance because it is "over there", just as Mubarak a short time ago dismissed the youth of Egypt gathered in Internet cafes and around their mobile phones, far from the centers of power in Cairo.  But the core is never safe as revolutions gather force. If the revolution is shaped by fundamental forces, it will ultimately prevail, even in the core. The older generation in power in the developed economies of the world, muttering about their sons and daughters spending all their time online, will not see it coming until it is too late.

And this revolution is shaped by fundamental forces.  We are living in a world where flow will prevail and topple any obstacles in its way.  As flow gains momentum, it underdemines the precious knowledge stocks that in the past gave us security and wealth. It calls us to learn faster by working together and to pull out of ourselves more of our true potential, both individually and collectively. It excites us with the possibilities that can only be realized by participating in a broadeer range of flows. That is the essence of the Big Shift.

A couple of years ago, I offered a Manifesto for Passionate Creatives. Perhaps it is time for a broader manifesto for the younger generation seeking to throw off the shackles of the older generation.

The TED question

These thoughts were stimulated by a variety of the talks I heard at TED over the past week.  In particular, Wadah Khanfar, the head of Al Jazeera, gave an eloquent view of the bravery of the youth movement in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. Salman Khan, a former hedge fund analyst, talked about the revolution he is leading from the edge in the world of education to foster student-driven learning. Sarah Kay, a woman in her early twenties, took my breath away with the passion and energy that surged forth from her spoken word poetry.  And finally, Roger Ebert, one of my heroes, moved me to tears with his grace, humor and passion in the face of debilitating illness that has stolen his voice. Eyes twinkling, he shared with us his quest to find a synthetic voice that would make it possible for him to speak again – he simply would not surrender his voice. There were more, many more experiences at TED but these stand out in terms of the passion, commitment and courage that will stoke the fires of the global revolution ahead.

In the face of all of this, it amazes me that so many in the US are focused on the latest rant of Charlie Sheen rather than the events in the Middle East. Many of us seem to be mesmerized by the progressive breakdown of a human being.  Perhaps he is an unconscious symbol for many of us of the progressive breakdown of a social order that is not sustainable. It is time that we shift our focus to the social order that is struggling to emerge from the corruption, debt and environmental degradation that saps the energy of our planet.  It is time for all of us to ask what can we do to help? That is the question that TED left me with this year.

Reviewing “A New Culture of Learning”

We all have the uncomfortable feeling that the education we received is serving us less and less well. The reassuring notion that the concentrated dose of education in our younger years would serve us well for the rest of lives appears increasingly suspect.  And this doesn’t even address our concerns for our children and grand-children.  How will they ever learn enough to keep up with the accelerating pace of change?

What if there was a different model?  What if there is an approach to learning that we could pursue throughout our lives?  What if there is an approach that wouldn’t be a burden, something to be dreaded, but instead would excite and engage us in ways that we would eagerly anticipate?

Well, I've just read a book that makes this seem like a realistic imperative, rather than an impossible dream.  My colleague and friend, John Seely Brown, has just come out with “A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change”, co-authored with Doug Thomas, a professor at the University of Southern California.  It is an inspiring call to action to re-imagine the kind of learning that will define the twenty-first century.

The key messages

It would be far too ambitious to try to summarize this book in the space of a blog posting (even my long blog postings).  So let me attempt to tease the reader with a few key messages from the book that I would summarize as follows:

• We are in need of a fundamental reassessment of our learning models

• New learning models will embrace and institutionalize tension

• Imagination and play are the fuel that will sustain learning

Need for reassessment of learning models

Doug and JSB make the case that the acceleration and expansion of change requires us to adopt learning models. These new models will equip us not just to cope with this change, but to embrace and benefit from it.

We have all heard the proverb about teaching a man to fish, rather than simply giving him fish. Doug and JSB point out that this is no longer sufficient:

. . . it is hardly cutting edge. It assumes there will always be an endless supply of fish to catch and that the techniques for catching them will last a lifetime. . . . our contention is that the pool of unchanging resources is shrinking, and that the pond is providing us with fewer and fewer things that we can identify as fish anymore.

We used to go to school, comfortable in the belief that we would learn a fixed set of skills that would serve us throughout our lives.  That belief is no longer valid, if it ever was. We now face the challenge – and opportunity – of life-long learning that will expand our focus well beyond specific skills and instill the dispositions and practices that will help us to continuously and rapidly evolve our skills.

Fortunately, as Doug and JSB point out, “the very things that are speeding up the rate of change in the world are also giving us . . . new tools [for learning]. “ We are harnessing the Internet, the virtual environments and platforms that ride upon it and the vast array of resources that it makes available to us to develop new approaches to learning.

Embracing tension

So, what are the new learning models?  This is the bulk of the book and, rather than try to do justice to the texture and nuance of the thinking, I'll focus on something that intrigued me as I read through the book.  Tension runs throughout various dimensions of these learning models. As a Hagelian, I embrace tension, for the friction it generates can lead to very creative new outcomes.

Education and Learning. Let’s start with education vs. learning.  Doug and JSB early on assert that they are not jettisoning the educational approaches that dominate our schools today:

. . . we do not argue that classrooms are obsolete or that teaching no longer matters.  Our goal is quite the opposite. We believe that this new culture of learning can augment learning in nearly every facet of education and every stage of life.

OK, fair enough. But as one begins to understand the full scope of what they describe as a new learning model, it stands in stark contrast to “the sage on a stage” transfer of explicit knowledge that dominates our educational systems today.  There is at least a tension here, between two fundamentally different approaches to learning, that I wish the authors had explored in more detail. Exactly where and how do these two fundamentally different approaches to acquiring knowledge come together?

Freedom and structure. As we are introduced to the new culture of learning embraced by Doug and JSB, we begin to see another tension surface – between freedom and structure. Here, they are talking about something quite different from the structure of a rigid curriculum with assigned readings and standardized tests to measure progress.

Learning needs boundaries and limits. These help to focus participants and challenge them to find creative new approaches. “Encountering boundaries spurs the imagination to become more active in figuring out novel solutions within the constraints of the situation or context.” The authors here are referring, for example, to the kinds of constraints that gamers face as they encounter new challenges in World of Warcraft and not the bureaucratic constraints that educational institutions all too frequently impose upon both teachers and students.

Tacit and explicit knowledge. The tension between tacit and explicit knowledge also frames the authors’ views on the increasing importance of new learning models.  Tacit knowledge is “the component of knowing that is assumed, unsaid, and understood as a product of experience and interaction.”  As Doug and JSB observe, “. . . educational institutions and practices focused almost exclusively on explicit knowledge, leaving the tacit dimension to build gradually on its own, over time.” But, they observe that tacit knowledge cannot be taught – it can only be learned, but only if the environment is designed to do that. In a stable world, focusing on explicit knowledge perhaps made more sense, but in a more rapidly changing world, tacit knowledge becomes increasingly central to our ability to thrive.

Questions and answers. One of the contrasts in the book that I loved the most involved the tension between questions and answers.  Education is all about answers, learning is much more about the questions. Doug and JSB point out that

. . . our educational system is built upon a structure that poses questions in order to find answers. . . . We propose reversing the order of things. What if, for example, the questions were more important than the answers. . . . With that shift in thinking, learning is transformed from a discrete, limited process – ask a question, find an answer – to a continuous one. Every answer serves as a starting point, not an end point. It invites us to ask more and better questions.

Personal and collective. The authors also play with the tension between personal and collective. “Collectives,” a concept that is central to the book, are

. . . a collection of people, skills, and talent that produces a result greater than the sum of its parts. For our purposes, collectives are not solely defined  by shared intention, action, or purpose  (though these elements may exist and often do). Rather, they are defined by an active engagement with the process of learning. . . . In the new culture of learning, collectives, as we define them, become the medium in which participation takes shape.

By this definition, collectives can take many different forms, including online gatherings of amateur astronomers, gamers participating in World of Warcraft and hackers who learn from each other the best techniques to gain access to the most secure computer systems in the world. Doug and JSB point out that the range of collectives is virtually limitless. Also, because of a mixture of physical and virtual components, they are generally available to everyone, wherever they are located and at whatever stage of life they happen to be.

Collectives provide the context for learning and the learning process involves a complex interplay between the personal and the collective.  Doug and JSB describe Mimi Ito’s work that emphasizes the importance of developing a sense of personal agency in the learning process. They also stress the importance of passion, something that comes from deep within each of us. Finally, they also discuss dispositions that individuals possess and that shape the learning process in significant ways.

Integrating imagination and play

At the end of the day, Doug and JSB strongly emphasize the need to put imagination and play front and center in the learning process. In fact, the last sentence in the book asserts:  “. . . where imaginations play, learning happens.” Shortly before this last assertion, Doug and JSB lay their cards on the table, “. . . we believe that connecting play and imagination may be the single most important step in unleashing the new culture of learning.”

Now, clearly, imagination and play are not part of the core curriculum of most educational institutions. So,where can it be found? Doug and JSB are bound to send most traditional educators reaching for the bottle of tranquilizers when they assert that

In our view, MMOs [ Massively Multiplayer Online games] are almost perfect illustrations of a new learning environment.  On one hand, games like World of Warcraft produce massive information economies, composed of thousands of message forums, wikis, databases, player guilds, and communities. In that sense they are paragons of an almost unlimited information network. On the other hand, they constitute a bounded environment within which players have near-absolute agency, enjoying virtually unlimited experimentation and exploration . . . Most important, the engine that drives learning in World of Warcraft is a blend of questioning, imagination, and – best of all – play.

Why are imagination and play so central to the learning process? Imagination is about seeing possibilities and generating the questions that frame the learning process. Play is about the engagement and experimentation that drives the learning process.  Both of these become even more powerful when they move beyond the individual and drive collectives that can learn from each other.

This is a provocative and deep book.  It is deceptively short but densely packed with many of the key concepts needed to shape our journey towards a culture of learning that will help us to turn the turmoil and change of the 21st century into a rich array of opportunities.  We need this change.  The good news is that we cannot avoid it. Some of us may resist it, but more and more of us will begin to see that it holds the key to thriving and not only demand it, but practice it. The rest will have little choice but to follow.

Betting on the LUSTI Nations

In an increasingly global and rapidly evolving economy, we are all motivated to pick the emerging “winners” that will benefit the most from globalization. A lot hinges on the outcomes. Where should we invest? Where should we open offices? Who should we be recruiting into our global networks?

Almost one decade ago, we were urged to focus on the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) as the most likely to become significant players on the global stage.  India and China have especially showed promise over the intervening time, becoming major players in global investment and trade.

Introducing the LUSTIs 

I went out on a limb last week and seem to have survived that adventure, so I am tempted to venture out on another limb and see if it will hold me as well.  In an uncharacteristically short post (OK, relatively short for me), I want to point out some dark horses that I believe have the potential to rise to prominence.  I call them the LUSTI nations.  Who are they? Well, in the world of acronyms, they are Lebanon, United Arab Emirates, Singapore, Tunisia and Israel.

Now that’s a pretty diverse group.  Of the group, perhaps Singapore has made the greatest strides towards carving out a global role.  A number of the others – Lebanon, Tunisia and Israel – are embroiled in local and/or regional political turmoil.

So, what’s the common element that pulls me to this LUSTI group?  At its simplest level, it is a combination of size, culture and aspiration.

Size matters – but not the way you might think

We live in a world rapidly moving from stocks to flows as a source of economic value.  In a world of flows, large size can become a significant disadvantage. Why?  Because institutions and countries with large size have a tendency to focus inward.  After all, they have enormous resources and talent within their boundaries.  There is a temptation to want to rely on those stocks and perhaps see less value in the flows surging around them.

Smaller countries do not have that luxury.  They quickly realize that their internal resources are very limited. They understand that, if they want to grow rapidly, they must find ways to connect with others outside their boundaries in ways that will create value for both sides.  They see that flows across and beyond their boundaries are the only way to succeed. Their opportunity is to develop and pursue strategies to become growing hubs of global flows of people, products, money and knowledge.
So, size can put things in perspective. It helps to focus the mind in terms of what is really important.  But it is not enough.  There are lots of small countries that will likely not become significant players on the global stage.

Culture shapes the potential for openness and trust-based relationships

Culture helps.  What do I mean by culture? In this case, I am referring to a diffuse set of elements, some of them historically derived and others more contemporary.  It helps if a country has a heritage of active trading beyond its boundaries.  It tends to make the people more open to the world economy and often more trusting and tolerant of diverse cultures and values.  Lebanon and Tunisia were part of the ancient Phoenician civilization – some of the most active traders in the world and they still cite that heritage with great pride. The Emirates now banded together in the UAE and Singapore have long been major trading posts.  Israel is a bit of an outlier here, but Jewish culture has a strong trading heritage embedded within it. 

Now, to talk about trust and tolerance in countries like Lebanon and Israel may sound like a bit of a stretch. They both have in recent years been wracked with sectarian strife.  I believe from personal experience, though, that these cultures have these traits deeply embedded within them. These traits remain beneath the surface today, ready to re-emerge when strong leadership can address the conditions that have given rise to domestic strife.

Tunisia is certainly in turmoil as I write this, but I have a strong sense that it is net positive turmoil.  It is providing a beacon to the disaffected youth throughout the Middle East and other parts of the world that regime change may not be as impossible as they once imagined.  Yes, Tunisia is on the edge of the Middle East and a smaller country, but the youth of the Middle East are closely watching what is happening here.  I believe that when the dust settles, we will see a more vital country emerge with much less bureaucracy and corruption and a growing focus on economic growth. Rule of law and an end to systemic corruption will be essential for any country that aspires to build the trust-based relationships required to become a global network hub.

Aspiration and strategy necessary to achieve potential

OK, so is that it?  No, there is a third element that needs to come into place.  The people and their national leadership need to have a strong aspiration to play this role of a global connector. They also need to develop a strategy that recognizes where they are today and that defines a pragmatic pathway to bootstrap into that global role.  At this point, only two of the LUSTI countries – Singapore and the UAE – have this third element in place. The other three countries have diverse challenges to overcome before such an aspiration and strategy become feasible.  Nevertheless, for different reasons in each of these countries, I see a strong potential to develop that aspiration and strategy.

Another scenario

An alternative scenario could also play out.  Rather than focusing on countries, perhaps we should pay attention to the dense urban centers that continue to grow around the world.  A strong argument can be made that these geographic “spikes” (to use a term that Richard Florida popularized) will increasingly establish autonomy relative to the national governments that host them.  These urban spikes could build upon the role that many of them (e.g., New York in finance and Silicon Valley, Shenzhen and Bangalore in technology) are already playing as network hubs in the global economy.

Placing bets

In fact, I will bet that elements of both of these scenarios will play out – they are not mutually exclusive.  Of course, large countries should not be counted out of the game – yet.  But if I had to handicap the evolving global business landscape, I would bet on small countries and urban spikes becoming the focus of economic value creation as large national governments become increasingly marginalized.  In a time of continuing disruption, size (at least as conventionally defined – population and geographic) generally turns out to be a disadvantage.

Passion and Plasticity – The Neurobiology of Passion

What if you could evolve and shape your brain in ways that help you to get better faster? What if you could unleash a virtuous cycle that connects passion, practice and performance?  What if it is not just you who could do this, but a whole cohort of people who have figured out how to wire their brains to accelerate performance improvement and who are committed to working with you to get better faster together?

Before I dive any further into this, I should caution that I am going so far out on the edge this time that I may finally fall into the precipice below. If I show signs of slipping, I am sure that some of you will reach out and gently guide me back to a more secure part of the edge. This is definitely an exploratory post.

I’m a business guy, with a particular passion for business strategy, but I am ultimately driven by the quest for potential and possibility.  In that context, I have long had an interest in neurobiology and in particular the emerging insight that our brains have the potential to continually re-shape themselves – the geek term is “neuroplasticity”. What got me excited the other day was the possible connection between passion and plasticity. 

Passion and dispositions

There are many different forms of passion.  My particular interest is in the passion of the explorer – a passion that takes the form of a long-term commitment to explore a particular domain, usually fairly broadly defined. It is not content with passive observation, but it wants to learn through doing. In the process, it seeks to achieve a growing impact on that domain by continuing to test and extend one’s own personal performance limits. 

I have increasingly focused on two key dispositions that define the passion of the explorer – a questing disposition and a connecting disposition.

A questing disposition continually seeks out new challenges to test and advance our capabilities.  People with this kind of disposition need continuing stimulation. But it is stimulation of a certain type – the kind that comes from going beyond one’s comfort zone, addressing new challenges, engaging in creative problem-solving and developing new skills to make progress in a challenging environment.

A connecting disposition, on the other hand, seeks to connect with others and form deep, trust-based relationships. For a passionate person, this is about continually reaching out to find people who share their passion or who might have some insights that can be helpful in pursuing their passion.  It is ultimately about a desire to learn from each other and to get better faster by working together.
The power of passion is that it brings these two dispositions together.  The relationships resulting from the connecting disposition help passionate people to more effectively set out on ever more challenging quests.  The quests in turn forge deep, trust-based relationships among those who jointly participate on a quest.

Two key neurotransmitters

So far, so good.  I’ve covered this ground before.  But here’s an interesting new link.  Two of the brain’s most powerful neurotransmitters – dopamine and oxytocin – map surprisingly well to the questing and connecting dispositions respectively. In fact, dopamine and oxytocin reward and reinforce the development of questing and connecting dispositions.

Let’s start with dopamine.  It is a neurotransmitter that performs many functions in the brain.  In this context, dopamine is associated with anticipation of rewards.  When we undertake a challenge and expect to overcome it, our brains release a surge of dopamine which gives us a sense of pleasure and helps to motivate us to pursue the anticipated reward. (Drugs like cocaine inhibit the reuptake of dopamine so we get more mileage from the dopamine in our brain – this helps to explain the intense feeling of pleasure that gives these drugs an addictive power.) If we achieve our expectations, dopamine helps us to feel elated and, conversely, if we fail to achieve our expectations, it makes us feel dejected.

As a result, dopamine stimulates exploratory/seeking behavior. It is much more tied to the anticipation of a reward than the actual attainment of the reward.  It makes us much more willing to embark on and remain committed to sustained initiatives that offer the expectation of rewards, even if the rewards are far from immediate.

Dopamine helps to alter the way we make risk/reward trade-offs, increasing our risk taking propensity.  It makes us much more willing to explore unfamiliar territory and try out new activities.

By now, the connection with quests becomes apparent.  Videogames become so quickly engaging for participants in part because game designers have figured out how to sequence quests so that early ones are relatively easy to accomplish and the expectation of future successes releases more and more dopamine, motivating participants to become more deeply immersed in the game and to engage in more and more challenging quests. Even if participants do not come into the game with a questing disposition, they often find themselves developing one as a result of the stimuli (both external and internal) that they encounter. There is a powerful reinforcing dynamic between videogames and brain chemistry. That same reinforcing dynamic plays out as passionate individuals pursue ever more challenging quests in real life.

Oxytocin has a different role to play.  It has a calming effect, reducing stress hormones whereas dopamine excites and stimulates. Oxytocin tends to dampen the parasympathetic reactions to stressful situations, making it easier to cope with stress.

Our brains release this hormone in a variety of situations – the most well known one being when the mother is in the presence of her child.  Oxytocin is released through touch and massage (giving it the nickname of the “cuddle chemical”) and it positively surges during sexual activity, especially at orgasm. More broadly, oxytocin appears to be produced through all forms of social interactions, including even potentially online social network activities.

Experimental tests suggest that oxytocin has a wide range of effects.  People with high levels of oxytocin tend to be more trusting, empathetic, and generous.  A powerful virtuous cycle appears to be set in motion by oxytocin – it is released through social and physical contact and in turn stimulates behaviors that tend to promote more social and physical contact.

Here, the link with a connecting disposition appears intriguing.  This oxytocin-induced virtuous cycle is exactly what would be required to nurture a connecting disposition – seeking out connections with others and building trust-based relationships with a broader and broader range of people.

Dopamine and oxytocin complement each other in interesting ways.  For example, dopamine release is associated with learning while oxytocin is associated with unlearning (often called the amnestic hormone, oxytocin helps us to wipe out learned behavior in part to help us adapt more readily to the approaches that others might take and foster deeper collaboration).  Dopamine encourages us to focus on more distant goals and territories, while oxytocin rewards closeness. Dopamine drives attraction, focusing attention, while oxytocin drives attachment, engaging attention. Dopamine and oxytocin both help us to become more extroverted than we might otherwise be, but dopamine encourages more utility-driven social contacts while oxytocin rewards deeper affiliations.

These (and other) neurotransmitters are receiving more and more attention in neurobiology. As the term “neurotransmitter” suggests, they play a critical role in stimulating the transmission of messages across the synapses of the brain.

The connection to neuroplasticity

So, what does this have to do with neuroplasticity? Well, the shaping of the brain critically depends on the selective strengthening of pathways across particular synapses and the progressive pruning of pathways across other synapses. "Neurons that fire together, wire together.” The brain over time evolves its wiring patterns.  It actually does this all the time as we process the sensory stimuli coming our way.  For example, people who listen to a lot of music have different wiring patterns in their brains than people who have not been exposed to a lot of music.

But it is not just about reacting to the sensory stimuli bombarding us on a daily basis.  Scientific research increasingly demonstrates that our brain wiring patterns can be significantly shaped by where we choose to focus our attention, particularly if we can sustain that focus over an extended period of time.  The example of Tibetan Buddhist monks who have displayed fundamentally different brain activity patterns as a result of years of meditation drives this point home.

This is where passion comes in, especially the passion of the explorer.  People with this form of passion make a sustained commitment to explore a particular domain, not simply for curiosity, but with the goal of making an increasing difference over time in that domain.  In a world of increasing distractions, their passion helps them to focus their attention.  The questing disposition associated with this passion continually seeks out new challenges and focuses attention even more finely on building the specific skills required to succeed in these quests. 

The dopamine release associated with these quests in turn helps to motivate individuals to stay true to their quest and to quickly seek out a new one as soon as the previous quest has been successfully concluded. Passion provides the initial catalyst for focus but dopamine rapidly kicks in to sustain attention on a progression of increasingly challenging quests within a particular domain.  The quests motivate people to engage with the domain – they are motivated to act, not simply to observe and reflect.  As a result of action in the domain, a host of sensory stimuli kick in to selectively develop certain areas of the brain.  For example, a car mechanic fine-tuning racing cars can hear and interpret the sounds that an engine makes in ways that most of us would find deeply mysterious.

As this passion takes shape, the connecting disposition also kicks in.  Passionate individuals actively seek out others who can help them in pursuing their passion and they quickly forge deep, trust-based relationships with these individuals.  Once again, passion provides the initial catalyst, but then oxytocin kicks in and provides rewarding feelings as these bonds get forged. It also makes it more natural for us to engage in the kinds of behavior that extend and deepen the bonds – trust, empathy and generosity.

But the end result is to steadily strengthen the brain to pursue the passion more and more effectively.  A powerful virtuous cycle begins to play out – the more effective our brains become at pursuing a particular passion, the more positive feedback we will feel from questing and connecting. The wiring of the brain will evolve in a distinctive way mapping to the particular passion in question.

The bottom line

Our brains are remarkably energy efficient organs.  Brains are plastic but they favor what they have experienced in the past as the tried and true.  It is why habits are so hard to break and why we instinctively resist going out of our comfort zones.  Without passion to provide the sustained focus of attention and dopamine and oxytocin to fuel and reward that passion, we will have a much harder time harnessing the enormous potential of neuroplasticity. 

There is in fact a biological link between passion and performance, a link forged by dopamine and oxytocin.  Our brains truly become biologically “hard-wired” in ways that make it increasingly difficult for others to replicate our performance. At the same time, the questing and connecting dispositions also provide safety valves to continually test and refine the neural hard-wiring against changing conditions in our environment.

Of course, we need to be careful about singling out two neurotransmitters and exploring their role in isolation.  If there is one thing we have learned from recent advances in biology, it is that reductionist approaches can only get us so far.  Witness the initial enthusiasm over the sequencing of the gene that has now been significantly tempered by the growing realization that our genes are only part of the puzzle. Proteomics and a host of other “-omics” have emerged to help us discern other parts of the puzzle. The brain is a classic example of a complex adaptive system that evolves within the even more complex adaptive system that is our body.

Yet, I cannot help but think that there is an interesting connection here that deserves to be explored in more depth.  I leave it to others much more expert than I am to either confirm this intuition or tell me where I have gone wrong. Is there in fact a neurobiology of passion?  If so, what are its constituents and the relationships that they weave together? Does passion in fact re-shape our brains in ways that make it harder and harder for those who lack this passion to compete with us?

Alone Together – An Important New Book by Sherry Turkle

Sherry Turkle has been on a journey. Sherry joined the faculty of MIT 30 years ago.  As a licensed clinical psychologist, she was, as she acknowledges, “a stranger in a strange land” (anyone making a Heinlein reference immediately wins my heart).

In 1984, she wrote her first book on computers and people, "The Second Self," in 1984, a book she describes as “full of hope and optimism.” Over time, her focus shifted from the one-to-one relationship between computer and individuals to the role that computers played in shaping relationships among people. Her second  book, "Life on the Screen", published in 1995, focused on  “the new opportunities for exploring identity online”. It applauded the space that online environments afforded for us, especially as youth, to experiment with our identities and in the process to define more fully our true identity.

Fifteen years later she has published a third book, “Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Computers and Less From Each Other”.  The title beautifully summarizes her growing concern that computers, rather than becoming catalysts for re-thinking identity, have seriously undermined our ability to connect in meaningful ways with each other.

The focus of "Alone Together"

This is a wonderful and thought-provoking book. It made me think in a way that few other recent books have.  It will no doubt stir up great controversy with the digerati. But it will hopefully provide all of us an opportunity to sit back and reflect on what many of us have given up as we rushed headlong into an embrace (increasingly in a literal sense) with the machines around us. The book is full of engaging stories and delightful turns of phrases that make the reader stop and think. 

Sherry’s goal is not just reflection, but to spark a conversation that will expand and sustain among all of us as we wrestle with the implications of the technology that increasingly shapes our lives. Ultimately, she hopes these conversations will prompt us to change our behavior, starting with small moves, in ways that help us nurture the many relationships that have frayed as we have become increasingly absorbed in the technology around us.

Sherry neatly summarizes her core thesis on the first page of her book:

Technology is seductive when what it offers meets our human vulnerabilities. And as it turns out, we are very vulnerable indeed. We are lonely but fearful of intimacy. . . . Our networked life allows us to hide from each other, even as we are tethered to each other. We’d rather text than talk.

Weaving narratives together

Sherry weaves together two narratives that play off each other in powerful ways.  As she relates:

I tell two stories in Alone Together: today’s story of the network, with its promise to give us more control over human relationships, and tomorrow’s story of sociable robots, which promise relationships where we will be in control, even if that means not being in relationships at all.

Sherry later summarizes her narrative:

The narrative of Alone Together describes an arc: we expect more from technology and less from each other. . . . Overwhelmed, we have been drawn to connections that seem low risk and always at hand: Facebook friends, avatars, IRC chat partners.  If convenience and control continue to be our priorities, we shall be tempted by sociable robots, where, like gamblers at their slot machines, we are promised excitement programmed in, just enough to keep us in the game.  At the robotic moment, we have to be concerned that the simplification and reduction of relationship is no longer something we complain about. It may become what we expect, even desire.

Sherry repeatedly returns to this paradox: "With sociable robots, we imagine objects as people.  Online, we invent ways of being with people that turn them into something close to objects."

The first section of the book describes the trajectory we seem to be pursuing with regard to robots: "In talking about sociable robots, I described an arc that went from seeing simulation as better than nothing to simply better, as offering companions that could meet one’s exact emotional requirements."

While I found this section intriguing, I was most deeply engaged by the second part of the narrative: the role of technology in diluting our personal relationships while seeming to enrich and expand them.  Her message is simple:  the very technologies that seem to offer more flexibility and scale in connecting with others – texting, online social networks and discussion forums – actually undermine the richness required for true intimacy to develop. While enhancing the appearance of intimacy, we are actually becoming more isolated and alone. There appears to be a Gresham’s Law of communication: weak forms of communication, left unchecked, can drive out strong forms over time.

Sherry drives these points home with deep stories of individuals wrestling with the consequences of these new communication technologies.  Those who come to this book looking for rich statistical data will be disappointed.  This is a powerful ethnographic study that makes its points come alive with individual stories and experiences.  It is up to the readers to decide how representative these stories are in terms of their own experience and the experiences of the people they know. For me, the stories were powerful and rang true.

Sherry also uses wonderful turns of phrases that cause readers to stop in their tracks to reflect on their meaning.  Here are just a few examples:

• "There but not there" (describing how we present ourselves in social situations)

• "Connectivity and its discontents"

• "Consumed by that which we were nourished by"

• "Moments of more may leave us with lives of less"

• "We have moved from multi-tasking to multi-lifing"

• "The notion of authenticity is for us what sex was for the Victorians – threat and obsession, taboo and fascination."

• "The ties we form through the Internet are not, in the end, the ties that bind. But they are the ties that preoccupy."

Going deeper to understand the causes

So, why are we using technology in ways that isolate while creating the illusion of connectivity? It would be too easy to say that technology makes it so.  The technology has power because it addresses psychological vulnerabilities that many of us have. We want connection, but many of us fear the consequences of connection. True intimacy can be very scary. As Sherry points out, this is particularly true of the narcissists – those with “a personality so fragile that it needs constant support”:

[The narcissistic personality] cannot tolerate the complex demands of other people but tries to relate to them by distorting who they are and splitting off what it needs, what it can use. . . . a fragile person can also be supported by selected  and limited contacts with people (say, the people on a cell phone “favorites” list). In a life of texting and messaging, those on that contact list can be made to appear almost on demand. You can take what you need and move on. And, if not gratified, you can try someone else.”

This can set into motion a vicious cycle. As Sherry points out:

. . . if we ask, “What does simulation want?” we know what it wants. It wants – it demands – immersion. But immersed in simulation, it can be hard to remember all that lies beyond it or even to acknowledge that everything is not captured by it. For simulation not only demands but creates a self that prefers simulation.  Simulation offers relationships simpler than real life can provide. We become accustomed to the reductions and betrayals that prepare us for life with the robotic.

I think Sherry is right to point out that the explanation for our particular usage patterns of communication technology must begin with our own individual needs and vulnerabilities.  But I would have liked her to go further in exploring how these patterns emerge and get reinforced by our broader social and economic contexts. She discusses increasing time pressure but does not really explore why this is occurring.

The impact of our business landscape

Many of the usage patterns she describes so compellingly have their source in the business world where globalization and digital technology infrastructures are increasing competitive pressure and leading to sustained erosion in performance. Rather than stepping back to reassess if the current way of doing business is still appropriate, the reaction of most business executives is to squeeze harder, demanding more output with fewer and fewer resources.  In this environment, the basic assumptions of the business world take even deeper root: transactions trump relationships, short-term trumps long-term, multi-tasking trumps focus, predictability and control trump experimentation and initiative.

The new modes of communication enabled by technology fit right in to this mindset. They provide us with the illusion of control and predictability.

Our children are not immune. Parents, sensing growing pressure on themselves, demand more from their children earlier in life. The day of the average child is programmed from early morning to late at night. As children grow into teens, the pressure mounts. Our children are often the first to embrace the new technology as a way to cope with the growing time pressures and adults then learn from their children.

In this context, we might want to challenge the conventional wisdom regarding the “consumerization” of IT.  Yes, individuals are rapidly adopting new forms of technology and drawing it into the enterprise. But perhaps they are adopting this technology in response to growing pressures from the workplace. Maybe they are using it in ways that are consistent with the dominant mindset in the business world.

In fact, there may be a long-evolving connection between our individual psychological needs and the evolution of our business landscape over the past 60 years.  Sherry cites the work of the sociologist David Riesman who, back in the mid-1950’s, observed that Americans were turning from an inner- to an other-directed sense of the self (the title of his book, “The Lonely Crowd,” echoes the title of Sherry’s book).  Riesman in fact tied this shift explicitly to the needs of the modern organization. More recently, Robert Putnam wrote his seminal book, “Bowling Alone”, a decade ago to draw attention to the significant decline in participation in civic organizations by the average American, blaming it in part to the rise of television and the Internet.

The rise of the push driven organization and its implications for the individual

Perhaps all of this has been playing out over a longer period of time in response to the rise of the 20th century organization, one built on a drive for scalable efficiency and the broad adoption of push programs to achieve this goal.  Push programs, designed to mobilize people and resources in advance to meet forecasted demand, have many interesting consequences. Predictability becomes the highest objective.

To achieve predictability, people are treated as objects, or better yet, robots designed to execute detailed programs. They learn that their needs are not important but that their status and rewards hinge on being externally focused on the needs of the organization.

Relationships fall by the wayside as everyone becomes more tightly focused on short-term transactions specified by the push programs. Communication becomes instrumental, designed to achieve the task at hand as quickly and as efficiently as possible. As performance pressures continue to mount, it is not surprising that we embrace any technology that emerges that can help us attain the robotic ideal more effectively.

So what is the answer?

To address these mounting pressures and the impact they have on the relationships around us, perhaps we need something more than conversations and small behavior changes. In the face of mounting pressures from our work lives, perhaps we need something more fundamental.  Perhaps we need to re-connect with our passion and find ways to integrate our passion with our profession.

In reflecting on Sherry’s book, I went through the exercise of identifying people that I thought were relatively immune from the technology-enabled behaviors that Sherry so eloquently identifies and criticizes.  The outliers that came to mind all had one thing in common: they were deeply passionate about their work and had what I have described as the “passion of the explorer”.

Driven by a connecting disposition, these people deeply engage with others and rapidly build trust-based relationships, relying heavily on face to face meetings and lengthy phone (or Skype) conversations. They enrich these relationships by drawing people into shared quests where deep engagement is required to come up with the creative new approaches to succeed in the quest.

These individuals are not vulnerable to continued distraction by the myriad demands on their attention. While they explore actively beyond their comfort zone, they remain tightly focused on the domain that is the object of their passion. They also have a deepening sense of self as they become more and more aware of their current limitations and the potential within them that needs to be drawn out.

The business implications of "Alone Together"

But, how to reconnect this back to our workplace? Well, it turns out that passion is a key driver of sustained extreme performance improvement. As individuals in an increasingly competitive world, we are more likely to succeed if we are pursuing our passion because we will improve our performance more rapidly than we would if we simply remain in a 9-5 job.  From a company perspective, companies will begin to realize that the old approaches are yielding diminishing returns and that the only way to remain competitive is to create environments that can help passionate employees to more effectively achieve their potential, including modes of communication that foster deep, trust-based relationships, both within the firm and outside the firm.

For reasons developed more fully in "The Power of Pull," Sherry’s book should not just be read as a plea to us as individuals struggling with fraying relationships.  It needs to become required reading for business executives to ponder in the context of mounting performance pressure. Are the modes of communication described by Sherry the modes that will be most helpful in driving creativity, innovation and rapid learning from each other? We are not only paying a high social price for our current use of technology; there is a high business price being paid as well.

Finding Stability at the Core of Change

As the New Year dawns, all of our thoughts turn to the changes ahead. At the same time, it might be an occasion to reflect on what will not change.  What will be the sources of stability that will help to sustain us through the accelerating changes unfolding around us? In virtually all of the writing about our era today among the digerati, there is very little focus on where that stability will come from and what will be required to nurture it.

The need for stability

I am particularly sensitive about this topic because of my childhood.  As many of you know, I grew up outside the United States, living in a different country virtually every year.  I gained enormously from the massive changes that I experienced on a continuing basis throughout my childhood.  But I also missed something, something really important.  I had very little stability.  My extended family was distant (at a time when distance really mattered) and my childhood friends came and went with each move to a different country (with no Facebook to stay in touch).  My only source of “stability” was a dysfunctional nuclear family with tremendous volatility. I felt the absence of stability with every passing day, I missed it and I suffered as a result of it. So, perhaps it is understandable why I focus on it more than others. But I am not alone.

As we move into a world of ever increasing flux and instability, one of the most striking trends is the demographic growth of fundamentalist religions across the world.  This is one of the most rapidly growing segments in the global population.  It is a trend that the digerati would prefer to ignore, dismissing these people as narrow-minded bigots and luddites.  To the extent that they cannot ignore this trend, the digerati instinct is to go on the attack, denouncing fundamentalists as obstacles to progress at best and as oppressors at worst.

Certainly, terrible things have been done in the name of fundamentalist religions of all stripes.  But perhaps, rather than instinctively dismissing and opposing these movements, we might actually want to engage with them. (I hasten to add here that I am personally not a religious fundamentalist.) By engagement, I mean making a legitimate effort to understand why such movements are gaining ground around the world at this particular time and exploring the legitimate unmet needs that might be fueling the growth of these movements.

I suspect the growth of these movements has something to do with a growing sense of an unmet need for stability. Change inevitably generates fear and, if there is nothing to hold onto as many of the things we knew and trusted fall by wayside, we are much more likely to try to stop change.

Sources of stability

Where could such stability come from in a world where 5 exabytes of new data spew forth every two days and where long-standing relationships give way to transactions that appear and disappear in the blink of an eye? What are the alternatives to theocratic regimes that ruthlessly impose the unchanging word of God on everyone?

I may be optimistic but I believe that, if we truly understand what is required to succeed in an ever more rapidly changing world, we will at the same time discover sources of stability that will provide us with the firm grounding that we all, even the most jaded adrenaline junkies, need to thrive.

Tacit knowledge. Let’s start with the observation that the growing avalanche of data increasingly distracts us from something far more valuable.  Here’s the paradox, as data proliferates, something else becomes more and more valuable and yet more difficult to access.  Tacit knowledge is the knowledge deeply embedded in each of us, our relationships and our unique contexts.  It is the knowledge that we find most challenging to articulate and communicate. But it is also often the knowledge formed by new experiences – providing early insights into the changing world around us. If we truly want to get an early understanding of what is emerging over the horizon, we need to find ways to tap into this tacit knowledge.  Accessing this knowledge requires real effort – effort that we increasingly find more and more challenging because of the overwhelming distractions of the flood of data and transactions that consume our attention. Who has time?

Trust-based relationships. As a result, something else acquires more and more value.  At the time when we are consumed by short-term transactions, long-term, trust-based relationships acquire more and more importance.  Tacit knowledge does not “flow”. In the words of JSB, it is “sticky”. We find such knowledge very difficult to articulate, even to ourselves, even though it comes naturally to us in our daily activities. The best way to access tacit knowledge is in the context of trust-based relationships, relationships that take time to develop and evolve. In the absence of trust, we are unlikely to make the effort to communicate the tacit knowledge we have, especially because we are likely to stumble and make mistakes – we are likely to become vulnerable and we need safety to feel comfortable doing this.  Once again, these trust-based relationships are more difficult to nurture at a time when we are deluged with data and transactions that demand more and more of our attention.

Talent development. Why does all this matter? Maybe we should just accept the inevitable and bid tacit knowledge and trust-based relationships a sad farewell. Well, here’s the rub.  In a more rapidly changing world, our success and, in a very real sense, our survival, depends on our ability to learn faster and accelerate the development of our talent.  The half-life of any skill is rapidly diminishing.  If we are not continually investing in talent development, we become marginalized.  What are the most relevant and valuable skills to acquire? They are the ones deeply embedded in the tacit knowledge of those on the edges of our economy and society, those who are encountering first-hand and ahead of the rest of us the challenges and opportunities that we all soon will face.  There’s very limited data on the edge and the data that does exist may help us to understand the “what” and the “why,” but rarely the “how.”

To get to the how, we need to find ways to access the tacit knowledge embedded in the people experiencing these changes. And, as we have seen, accessing tacit knowledge requires deep, trust-based relationships. This is exactly why tacit knowledge and trust-based relationships acquire increasing value as the pace of change accelerates – without them, we will never be able to develop the most valuable skills required to succeed and survive in a more rapidly changing world.

The bottom line

So, the optimist in me says that accelerating change breeds exactly the kinds of needs that will give rise to new sources of stability.  While the digerati remain entranced with ever larger data flows and millisecond transactions, something much more valuable calls for our attention.  As we enter a new decade, the greatest wealth will be created by a new set of entrepreneurs. These entrepreneurs will understand and address the unmet needs of those who want to participate in environments that foster deep, trust-based relationships across both virtual and physical space.  These environments will focus participants on the opportunity to learn faster by working together in addressing challenges that draw on the tacit knowledge of each participant. This is an opportunity that none of the current leaders of the commercial Internet understand, much less address.  There is a white space here.

In addressing this white space, we may begin to find common ground with the millions around the world who have reacted to accelerating change by opting out and embracing the never changing word of God. These people might begin to see change as an opportunity to develop their potential more fully and, in the process, develop a deep set of relationships that offer a foundation for coping with the challenges of change.  At the same time, the digerati may begin to embrace more fully the need to build long-term, trust-based relationships in order to effectively harness the opportunities created by change. They might in fact begin to articulate a new variant of the sacred, one that is not static and defensive, but one that celebrates the infinite creativity of the universe.

If we listen carefully to the fundamentalist critique, we may come to recognize that our lives have indeed become less satisfying and more superficial because of our growing focus on data and transactions in ways that make it more and more difficult to achieve our potential as individuals, institutions and society. The three T’s – tacit knowledge, trust-based relationships and talent development – may become the common ground to help us all advance to new levels.

Both camps across the global chasm may finally begin to see that sustainable change requires a foundation of stability and that stability has even more value if it enables all of us to more effectively realize our potential.  Beyond stability lies thrivability and thrivability can only be achieved by more effectively integrating change and stability. Perhaps it is too much to hope for, but I believe that many of those displaying the passion of the true believer could discover the delights of the passion of the explorer.

On a personal level, I cherish the growing set of deep relationships that have evolved as part of my quest to be a catalyst for change. It provides a stability that I sorely missed as a child and young adult. But, here's the paradox, it also helps me to grow in ways that I never could on my own.

My Personal Passion Trajectory

As I've become more engaged on the topic of passion, I've been thinking about the inevitable question: what is my passion?  How would I characterize it? How has it evolved over time? As I reflected on these questions, I developed some real insight about the essence of my passion, so I thought I would share it in case it might help others to explore and understand their passion.

Construction Projects

One of my earliest memories is a fascination with tractors and construction equipment.  On weekends, my parents knew that nothing would make me happier than taking me to a construction site where large equipment sat idle and where I could clamber over the equipment and imagine that I was manipulating the equipment to build some incredible edifice.  Forget about toy tractors.  I wanted the real thing – it got me very excited to sit in the seat of a large bulldozer.

What was that all about?  I would not have been very articulate at the time, but even at this early stage I was passionate about potential and possibility – especially very large scale potential and possibility.  In my mind’s eye, I could see extraordinarily intricate buildings with graceful curves rising from the barren ground, providing inviting places for people to work and live.  There was so much possibility in that ground. The potential was there to be tapped.  I didn’t just want to passively observe the construction process – I wanted to be at the helm of the massive equipment required to release that potential.

Cities

When I got a bit older, I discovered school.  Rather than possibility and potential, I saw boredom and barriers.  So I broke out.  I was almost expelled from third grade because I had taken to forging notes from my mother asking me to be released from class so that I could go to doctor’s appointments.  I developed a reputation among the school staff as a very sickly child. 

In fact, what I was doing was venturing out on the streets of Caracas, Venezuela (where we lived at the time) to explore the incredible sights and sounds of a complex city.  What drew me into the streets was a fascination with the diversity of the people drawn to the large city in search of opportunity.  I saw very different possibilities in my travel through the streets. I didn’t want to just read about these possibilities or even observe them through a car window.  I wanted to be on the streets, experiencing these possibilities firsthand. My adventures came to an unexpected end when, one day, my mother showed up earlier than usual at the school and was told by a puzzled administrator that she thought I was with her at the doctor’s office.

Countries

As a child, I lived in a different country virtually every year.  It was an extraordinary experience – I saw so many different cultures and lifestyles that I developed a deep appreciation for the potential and broad possibilities available to people as they strived to make a difference.  I developed a deep curiosity about how people lived and the different cultures they developed to help them connect and draw on the strengths of others.  I now badgered my parents to go exploring on weekends, venturing out to the countryside and remote towns, eager to absorb all the possibilities around me.  If we were on a highway and there was an opportunity to take a smaller, less direct road, I would always vote for the back roads.

Markets

As I headed into high school, I discovered economics. Not the dull, static economics of equilibrium and ceteris paribus, but the much more tumultuous economics of entrepreneurship and creative destruction. Hayek, Mises and Schumpeter excited my imagination with the power of markets to tap into local knowledge, coordinate activity across vast distances and unleash innovation from unexpected quarters to challenge entrenched interests and create opportunity for a whole new set of players. 

This was really exciting. Markets could scale much better than even the most ambitious construction project.  Markets were far more diverse and dynamic than any individual city or even national culture.  They offered rich opportunities to develop new potential and harness a growing array of possibilities. I was hooked.  Once again, I didn’t just want to read about these markets. I wanted to get into those markets and participate in building businesses that could unleash greater and greater potential.

Business strategy

I ended up in management consulting.  I loved the opportunity to engage with a large number of diverse people and tackle really big opportunities for innovation and growth.  I became more and more focused on strategy consulting. It offered an opportunity to help companies explore new possibilities in terms of growth and innovation and ultimately to achieve their potential more fully.

Information technology 

I left my first consulting job at BCG to launch a computer startup.  This was the catalyst for my move to California and particularly to Silicon Valley.  It also provided a deep immersion into information technology, a field where, as an economic history major, I had precious little exposure.  Once again, I was hooked.  I discovered that information technology was an incredibly dynamic domain, constantly generating new capabilities that could amplify our potential as human beings.  It offered me a new set of tools to help others to achieve their potential and expand their array of possibilities.

I ultimately returned to strategy consulting, though, because I found startup life far too all consuming. I had significant impact on my immediate surroundings, but I wanted more.  I wanted to reach out and connect to far more people. 

As I moved back into consulting, I discovered the power of writing and speaking to large groups.  I could have far more impact on the potential and possibility of others through writing than I could ever hope to achieve through one on one consulting.  I began to write about the intersection of business strategy and information technology and especially the new opportunities created at this intersection.

The passion path

As I step back and reflect on this evolution of my passion over time, I begin to see a common theme. At one level, my passions could not be more diverse – construction, international life, economics and technology. But they have all been focused on one quest – how to participate in ways to scale potential and possibility for others.  Each time I have shifted focus, it has been to find a way to scale potential and possibility even more effectively so that I could broaden my impact.  From a single construction site to an individual city or country to a global economy to an increasingly powerful global engine for amplifying reach and richness of relationships, my passion has led me on a journey of expanding horizons.

My passion has not shifted – it has evolved, with previous generations of passion still living on – I still engage in my earlier passions. Think of them as geological sediments that still live on and support the passion layers above. 

Passions can evolve significantly over a lifetime, yet they often display a common theme that knits together various stages of development.  My own personal passion trajectory illustrates this progression.

The personal path

Something interesting also happened along the way.  My passion has always been about scaling potential and possibility for others.  Over time, I began to find that pursuing my passion opened up more potential and possibility for me as well.  I began life as a very shy individual with few deep relationships. As I have pursued my passion, I felt an increasingly compelling need not just to observe and understand but to make more and more contributions of my own. In the process, I have been able to overcome my natural shyness (not entirely, but to a far greater degree than I would have imagined possible).

Initially, I found an outlet in writing that allowed me to express myself and contribute from the safety of my study, without having to take on too much of the perceived risk in personal relationships. I found that I got a lot of positive feedback from my writing. The efforts of many who have read my work to reach out and connect in person helped motivate me to overcome my natural instinct to stay in my study.  I have built a rich and growing network of relationships with those who share my passion.

What is your passion trajectory?  Has your passion remained constant?  Can you define a common theme tying together the various strands of passion that you may have pursued over your life?

[I covered a briefer version of this passion trajectory in my talk earlier this year at the Business Innovation Factory Summit in Providence, Rhode Island]

The Big Shift: Challenge and Opportunity for Women

How are women affected by the longer-term changes that are transforming our business environment? This issue is rarely explored.  Since I am on the edge anyway, I thought I would venture into this potentially sensitive topic. 

Last week I had an opportunity to address a gathering of TEDxWomen in the Bay area. This offered the opportunity I needed to frame a perspective that had been been evolving regarding the gender implications of the Big Shift.  My talk last week provided me with the forum to share some of these ideas.  It was very well received, so I thought I might share it with a broader audience here to get further feedback and reactions.

The challenge for women

As those who follow me know by now, a key element of the Big Shift, especially in its early stages, is a significant and sustained erosion of corporate performance.  This is a trend that has been playing out for over four decades now. It is represented most graphically in our Shift Index by the 75% decline in return on assets for all US public companies since 1965. It shows no sign of leveling off, much less turning around.

In a period of mounting performance pressure, targets of biases tend to suffer the most. When rewards become scarcer, there is a tendency for people who are discriminated against to have an even harder time in getting ahead.  Since women continue to suffer bias in the workplace, this mounting performance pressure represents an even greater challenge for them.

But it gets worse.  As pressure increases, there is tendency to adopt a zero sum view of the world – if someone else gains, I necessarily must lose.  In this view, we are at war; we can give no quarter.

The prevalence of the masculine archetype

In a time of war, a certain type of approach tends to become more dominant – let me call it the “masculine archetype”.  The masculine archetype is built upon a certain set of beliefs:

• We can't afford to get tied down in long-term relationships – our focus is on short-term transactions (“battles”) where the goal is to get as much as possible out of each transaction and to treat each transaction as an independent event – buy low, sell high and move on

• There is no room for emotion – emotion is a luxury that we can’t afford to indulge in, we must put emotion to the side

• Expressions of vulnerability must be avoided at all costs – we must always project strength

• We must be deeply analytical, dispassionately seeking to understand the world around us

• Complex systems can and should be reduced to their component parts so that the analysis is feasible and can be completed in a short period of time

• Once we understand the component elements, we need to move quickly and ruthlessly to exploit any advantage available to us

• Change represents threat and risk – we must find ways to control our environment so that it stabilizes and becomes more predictable

From the viewpoint of this masculine archetype, what we really need are a few good men (literally).  If women want to participate in the effort, they must be prepared to adopt and embrace this masculine archetype.

Understanding the cause of mounting pressures

This reaction to the mounting pressure is a key part of the problem – it reflects a complete lack of understanding of the sources and causes of the mounting pressure that companies are experiencing.

Put briefly, the mounting pressure is not just the result of intensifying competition.  The basis of competition is also shifting in fundamental ways.  For example, the source of value creation is shifting from knowledge stocks to knowledge flows, something I have described in more detail elsewhere. In a world of more rapidly depreciating knowledge stocks, the only way to continue to create economic value is to find ways to participate in a larger number of richer and more diverse knowledge flows. The deterioration in corporate performance reflects our futile attempts to make practices and institutions developed in a previous era work in a new era requiring different approaches to create value.

Requirements for success

Let’s drill down on this a bit.  When I talk about knowledge flows, I am not focusing on large databases flowing through cyberspace.  The knowledge that has greatest value in times of rapid change is tacit knowledge, the knowledge that we all have in our heads that is tied to certain contexts, often quite new, and that we have great difficulty expressing to ourselves, much less anyone else. This knowledge is usually experienced holistically rather than reducible to abstract categories and isolated modules. For all of these reasons, this knowledge does not flow very well at all. In the words of my esteemed collaborator, JSB, this knowledge is remarkably sticky.

As a result, trust based relationships become more and more valuable.  It is only in the context of trust based relationships that people become willing to invest the time and take the risk to express the tacit knowledge they have. So, if we want tacit knowledge to flow, we must first become adept at building deep, trust-based relationships.  Trust is challenging to build.  It requires a willingness to express vulnerability – if we are unwilling to express weakness or failures we have had, it is very difficult for someone else to fully trust us.  Trust is also easier to build when it is clear that all participants are driven by a desire to learn and reach new levels of performance.  In that context, zero sum relationships that focus on dividing a fixed pie of rewards evolve into positive sum relationships where participants are driven by the opportunity to expand the overall pie.  When there is a real prospect of expanding rewards, we are much more likely to trust others than when everyone is focused on how to get a bigger share of a fixed pie.

In a rapidly changing world, though, it is not enough to have a few trust-based relationships.  To get access to a broader and more diverse range of knowledge flows, we must find ways to scale the number of trust based relationships that we can build and maintain.  Rather than a few trusted strategic partners, we must find ways to weave together large ecosystems of participants that can help us to more rapidly refresh our knowledge stocks by tapping into many diverse environments.

Now, let’s step back and reflect on the masculine archetype described earlier.  Is this archetype one that is likely to succeed in the effort to build large numbers of trust based relationships to access tacit knowledge?  Not very likely.

The feminine archetype

What is required is a very different archetype.  For convenience and contrast, let me characterize this different archetype as the “feminine archetype”.  What does it look like?

• We need to build and nurture long-term relationships, rather than focusing on short-term transactions

• To really understand the world around us, we must adopt a much more holistic approach, seeking out the patterns and deep dynamics that shape broader more complex systems

• Our communication styles need to become richer and more nuanced – rather than trafficking in large data sets and quantitative analysis, it focuses on metaphors, stories and images as a way to engage the imagination and achieve a deep understanding of the essence of events and environments.

• We will be much more effective if we can integrate our feelings and intuition to deepen connections, motivate participants to act and mobilize them in ways that increase impact

• We embrace change because it provides a powerful catalyst for growth and learning

This archetype is far more promising in terms of building long-term trust-based relationships and participating in flows of tacit knowledge.  In fact, by facilitating these efforts, this archetype can turn mounting pressure into expanding opportunity.  We may for the first time have the opportunity to move from a diminishing returns world to an increasing returns world.  This truly would catalyze a profound shift.

The bottom line

The future of business belongs to the feminine archetype.  The future belongs to those of us, female or male, who can adopt and embrace the feminine archetype.  It offers far more potential and possibility than the masculine archetype which worked much better in a world of scalable efficiency than in today’s world of scalable peer to peer learning. Those of us who remain wedded to the masculine archetype will find ourselves increasingly stressed and challenged as the world evolves more rapidly around us.

Now, of course, it is ultimately not an either/or choice.  We must find ways to more effectively integrate the masculine and feminine archetypes to draw on the strengths of each.  But, at the end of the day, the pendulum must swing much more in the direction of the feminine archetype if we are realize the potential that the Big Shift represents for all of us

Passion and Wisdom

Passion and wisdom. Youth and age.  Most of us would say that these are two ends of the spectrum.  Many say that one can either be passionate or wise, but not both.  Passion typically prevails in one’s youth while wisdom gains prominence with age and experience.

I want to challenge this belief.  In fact, passion and wisdom amplify each other – each one alone has far less impact than when the two are combined. Rather than opposites, these two are powerful complements.

Defining passion and wisdom

Both passion and wisdom have many meanings, so let me begin by offering my own interpretation of each.  As I have written before, I focus on the passion of the explorer – a sustained commitment to exploring a particular domain and to achieving constantly increasing levels of performance and impact in that domain over time.

Wisdom also has many meanings but the one that resonates with me is ability to draw out optimal value from people, shaped by a deep understanding of existing performance capabilities – both one’s own and those of others. Wisdom understands the value that matters the most and seeks to draw more of it out in a sustainable way, given existing performance limits. Sustainability is a key attribute here – anyone can squeeze hard in the short-term to draw out the next increment of value but being able to sustain that value over time is far more challenging – and rewarding for all concerned.

Common elements of passion and wisdom

From this perspective, both wisdom and passion are concerned with performance limits.  Wisdom focuses on existing performance limits but seeks to derive as much value as possible within these limits.  Passion on the other hand focuses on overcoming these performance limits and achieving higher and higher levels of performance. In this context, it is perhaps easy to understand why these two attributes are often viewed as opposites – wisdom accepts and operates within existing performance limits while passion continually seeks to challenge and go beyond existing limits.

But both wisdom and passion are dynamic – they both seek to go beyond what has already been achieved. Wisdom is not passive – it always looks for new approaches to increase value within existing performance limits. In contrast, passion explores ways to transcend existing performance limits.  Neither one passively accepts the status quo – both are engaged in a quest to realize more value given current conditions.

The perils of passion and wisdom in isolation

Wisdom in isolation falls prey to diminishing returns.  No matter how thoughtful and creative we might be, we ultimately run up against the limits of current capability.  The longer we work at it, the harder it becomes to find the next increment of value within current performance limits.

Even more seriously, wisdom is vulnerable in the Big Shift.  The unstated assumptions and insights about limits, often developed in an earlier time, are prone to becoming incorrect and even barriers to progress.  In isolation, without continual testing, wisdom can become an obstacle to innovation as “wise” leaders apply the experience gained in an earlier era to changed circumstances. If “wisdom” remains wedded to earlier views of capabilities, it narrows and confines, rather than expanding and exploring.

On the other hand, passion in isolation falls prey to reckless risk-taking, increasing the prospect of catastrophic failure.  Without a clear understanding and appreciation for current performance limits, we embark on initiatives that take us well beyond the edge into the abyss beyond.

The imperative to integrate passion and wisdom

In a world of mounting performance pressure where current limits become prisons that ultimately crush participants, effectively integrating wisdom and passion is not just an opportunity, it is an imperative.

We need the productive friction that comes from bringing together passion and wisdom. Wisdom calls us to understand deeply existing limits while passion calls us to embark on a never-ending quest to expand those limits and discover new levels of performance.  Passion continually challenges our assumptions about limits while wisdom continually reminds us that we must pursue paths that honor who we are today. The friction comes from the tacit knowledge that shapes both passion and wisdom – it can help to render this tacit knowledge more explicit and test and refine it. 

In practice, the people that continue to achieve new levels of performance within a particular domain demonstrate a remarkable ability to integrate passion and wisdom.  Think of extreme athletes or top tier players in World of Warcraft.  These participants are constantly probing beyond current levels of performance but they deeply understand existing limits for themselves and those they collaborate with. It is precisely this careful balancing act that enables them to take appropriate risk and successfully discover new approaches that define new levels of performance.

Passion and wisdom come together in a remarkably powerful form of bootstrapping.  Passion relentlessly seeks out new edges to drive performance to new levels, tempered by the understanding of limits provided by wisdom.  Wisdom strives to extract as much value as possible within current limits, tempered by the continual urge provided by passion to test and extend those limits. By integrating both of these, we make the most of what we have while constantly striving to find ways to reach new levels of performance. This is precisely the definition of success in a world of mounting performance pressure – making the fullest possible use of the resources available to us while never accepting the limits imposed by those resources.  By combining these two attributes, we make thrivability, rather than sustainability, our reality.

The power to build trust-based relationships

These two traits also have a profound social impact as well.  They combine to produce deep, trust-based relationships that help to draw out far more sustainable value than could ever be accomplished by any individual in isolation.  As I have noted elsewhere, passion is marked by a strong connecting disposition. People with passion are constantly searching for others who either share their passion or who can be helpful to them in their quest to achieve new levels of performance.

But passion does even more.  People with passion are not just connecting with others; they find it far easier to build deep, trust-based relationships.  Think about those you know who have passion.  They have little patience for the carefully crafted facades that business texts urge us to present – accentuating our strengths and accomplishments while hiding our weaknesses and limits.  Passionate people have to time for such facades.  What you see is what you get.  They present themselves as who they are – something that helps to build trust more quickly.

But there's something even more powerful.  Think about it.  Very shortly after meeting someone with passion, he/she is likely to start describing a really gnarly problem they are wrestling with, acknowledging that they don’t have a clue what the answer might be and inviting others to offer any ideas or suggestions that they might have.  Passionate people quickly and willingly express vulnerability. Sharing vulnerability builds trust – in fact, it is virtually impossible to build trust without sharing vulnerability.

Now, let’s combine passion with wisdom.  Wisdom deeply understands existing limits.  This also helps to build trust.  If a passionate person communicates they understand their own limits as well as the limits of those around them, others are likely to trust that the person will act prudently in ways that will not expose themselves or others to unnecessary or unexpected risk.

By building trust more effectively, wisely passionate people are able to mobilize people and resources far beyond their own sphere.  They are far more effective in leveraging the capability of others and, with relatively modest resources of their own, they can achieve significant and lasting impact.  In fact, for them, small moves, smartly made, can set big things in motion.

The tragedy today

Given all of this, why do we continue to treat passion and wisdom as opposites, in deep conflict with each other, rather than as complements, that are increasingly needed to amplify and reinforce each other?  Even more importantly, why are passion and wisdom in such short supply within the corporate world?

The answers to these questions are perhaps worthy of another posting. For the moment, though, let me offer a high level response.  Both passion and wisdom, properly understood, are long-term quests, inspiring continuing creativity and exploration in search of ways to generate ever more sustainable value.

As such, they stand in stark contrast to our prevailing push mindsets, practices and institutions that reward, and in fact demand, short-term predictability. These approaches seek to enforce well-defined and tightly integrated programs to ensure predictability.  Our push world relentlessly seeks out more and more efficiency while both passion and wisdom focus on creating more value from available resources.

Even more fundamentally, both passion and wisdom are not predictable – that is in fact their great strength, they are continually coming up with new ways to create more value. The tragedy is that, in today’s world, this makes both of these attributes deeply suspect even though they are both more needed than ever.

2010 Shift Index – Passion and Performance

Over two years ago, John Seely Brown and I set out on a quest, one that experts called “valuable, but foolhardy.”  What were we trying to do? We wanted to create an index that would help business leaders and policy makers to make sense of the long-term changes re-shaping our business landscape.

It all began with an exercise in a conference room. We wanted to know what indices decision-makers use to understand the economic and business environment. As we put up all the usual suspects on a white board – inflation, unemployment, factory orders, etc. – one thing became clear.  All the indices focused on short-term economic trends. They were very helpful on that dimension. But they offered little insight on the longer-term trends playing out around us.

Virtually every business executive we knew strongly believed we were in the midst of a profound, long-term shift in our global economy.  Yet, there did not seem to be an index to help executives understand and track those longer-term changes.

We brought together a workshop of the architects of some of our leading indices today.  They confirmed that there were no indices focused on this longer-term shift. They agreed that such an index would be extremely valuable. But they also warned that such an undertaking would be virtually impossible to pull off.  There were simply too many moving parts and many of the key elements would be very difficult to quantify.

That was all we needed to hear.  There was something very valuable to pursue that would be extremely challenging to develop.  Just the sort of quest that gets us excited.  We recruited a team of Edge Fellows at our Center for the Edge to join this quest with us. While many Edge Fellows ultimately contributed to our quest (they are listed in the Shift Index), two in particular played a pivotal role in helping to orchestrate and design the effort: Duleesha Kulasooriya and Dan Elbert.

The first Shift Index

Eighteen months later, we released in the Spring of 2009 the first Shift Index, containing 25 metrics designed to capture key dimensions of the Big Shift in the US economy. In the Fall of 2009, we issued a sequel that broke apart the US economy data into thirteen distinct industries, so that we could better understand how the Big Shift was playing our at an industry level.

The release of the 2010 Shift Index

Late last week, we issued the 2010 edition of the Shift Index, updating each metric with new data.  Perhaps not surprisingly, given its focus on long-term trends, this edition of the Shift Index confirms many of the trends identified in the original report. In a previous posting, I summarized the key trends revealed by our original report.

The Shift Index delivers one key message:  our companies are experiencing mounting performance pressures, pressures that they have not been successful in addressing. One way of thinking about this is to imagine a pincer move on our companies, with increasingly powerful customers on one side and increasingly powerful creative talent on the other side, both coming together to extract more value from the companies they deal with. This pressure has been mounting steadily for over four decades and there is no evidence of it leveling off, much less turning around.

This puts into perspective our current obsession with the much anticipated recovery from the economic downturn.  While certainly important, this obsession tends to distract from a much more profound and long-term challenge that continues to mount in the background and will likely persist far beyond the economic recovery that offers some temporary respite from the mounting pressure.

To measure this mounting performance pressure, the Shift Index focuses on return on assets (ROA) for all public companies in the US since 1965. The bottom line: ROA has collapsed by more than 75% over this period.  Many people questioned our original choice of ROA as the key measure of business performance.  While we continue to believe that this is the best measure of business fundamentals, the new edition of the Shift Index looks at a number of the suggested alternative measures, including return on invested capital and return on equity, and confirms that these measures have also declined significantly over this time period.

Passion and performance

This edition of the Shift Index also goes into more detail regarding the level of passion in our workforce and its likely impact on business performance.  In particular, we highlight two dispositions that are closely linked to passion: questing disposition and connecting disposition. A questing disposition addresses the desire to seek out challenges to test one’s performance and achieve new levels of performance. A connecting disposition focuses on the desire to actively seek out people who share one’s interests and who can be helpful in addressing new challenges.

Our proprietary survey of the US workforce indicates that employees who are passionate about their work are twice as likely to have a questing disposition and a connecting disposition. For companies hoping to overcome mounting performance pressures having passionate workers with these dispositions would significantly improve their likelihood of succeeding.

If you want to improve the performance of your company in a world of increasing uncertainty where the scale and diversity of trust-based relationships increasingly drives potential for value creation, you want workers with questing and connecting dispositions – in other words, you want workers with passion.

The challenge is that passion levels remain very low within the workforce – under 25% of the workers are passionate about their work.  And there’s an even bigger problem for large companies. The level of passion in the workforce is inversely related to the size of the company – the larger the company, the lower the level of passion among the workers.  The most passionate workers are those who are self-employed or working as independent contractors.

Our survey reveals that 26 percent of workers would like to become an independent contractor or consultant.  According to the survey, many of the individuals who choose traditional employment do so for reasons that are steadily eroding —guaranteed employment and healthcare benefits.  Factors most cited by those currently employed by firms for their hesitation in becoming independent were a need for steady income (58 percent), need for healthcare (50 percent), uncertainty in the current economy (47 percent) and need for benefits (45 percent). These factors are also the most cited by those employees that remain at their current jobs despite the fact that it does not allow them to pursue their passions.

It is becoming urgent to find ways to more actively engage those who are already passionate while pursuing approaches to more effectively motivate and engage the workers who have yet to find passion in the work they do. Executives need to look at all of the institutional and technological barriers that frustrate employees and prevent these employees from seeking out challenges that will drive performance improvement.

By removing the impediments to questing and connecting behaviors, executives can help reduce the frustration of passionate employees that make them vulnerable to other job opportunities.  Even better, those passionate employees will not be diverting their energies from workarounds and will be able to focus, instead, on engaging in, and overcoming, real performance challenges.

Our hope is that the Shift Index will continue to help executives to pull back from their short-term focus and develop a more robust agenda focused on driving sustained extreme performance improvement. In that context, we urge all executives to take a hard look at the passion (or lack of it) within their workforce and to view this as a key lever in driving performance improvement.  Without it, companies and their workers will find themselves increasingly stressed and marginalized.