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True Transformation: From the Caterpillar to the Butterfly

What is transformation?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rethink strategy

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

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

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

Reframe innovation

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

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

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

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

Scale the edge

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

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

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

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

The bottom line

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

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

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

Re-Building Trust in Our Institutions

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

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

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

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

Fear and trust

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

The trap of scalable efficiency

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

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

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

The big shift from scalable efficiency to scalable learning

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

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

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

The role of narratives in building trust

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

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

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

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

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

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

The bottom line

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

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

Shaping Serendipity through Narrative

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

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

Shaping serendipity

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

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

Some background on narratives

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

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

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

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

The potential of narratives to shape serendipity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What we need to do to shape serendipity with narratives

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The bottom line

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

Additional material

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

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

Seeking Your Help – A Future for More Human Work

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

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

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

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

We need your help

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

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

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

The Paradoxical Power of Narrative

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

The paradox

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

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

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

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

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

Resolving the paradox

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

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

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

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

The role of narrative

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bottom line

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

Resolve To Do Your New Year’s Resolutions Differently

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

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

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

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

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

Zoom out

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

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

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

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

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

Zoom in

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

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

Finding your passion

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

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

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

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

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

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

Crafting your narrative

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

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

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

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

Bottom line

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

Go Beyond the Christmas Stories to Find the Christmas Narrative

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

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

The stories of Christmas

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

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

Distinguishing between stories and narratives

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

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

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

The spread of threat based narratives

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

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

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

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

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

The religious narrative

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

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

The secular narrative

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

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

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

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

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

Come together

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

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

The opportunity ahead

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

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

The Hidden Dimension of the Learning Pyramid

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

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

People as the missing dimension

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

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

Coming together in creation spaces

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Coming together in cities

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

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

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

The increasing returns effect – learning faster together

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

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

The power of passion

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

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

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

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

The deeper meaning of pyramids

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

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

Bottom line

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

Never Under-Estimate the Immune System

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Position appropriately

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

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

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

Find the right sponsor

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

Pick an edge

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

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

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

Minimize resource requirements

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

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

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

Show results as quickly as possible

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

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

Scale as rapidly as possible

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

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

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

Bottom line

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

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

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

Mastering the Learning Pyramid

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

The static world of skills

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

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

The learning pyramid

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

Putting knowledge into context

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

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

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

Capabilities that drive learning

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

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

Passion as the foundation of learning

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

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

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

Broadening our horizons

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

Re-thinking our institutions

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

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

The learning journey of the individual

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

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

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

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

Bottom line

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

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