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Companies and Movements

On Labor Day, I posted about movements and the foundations for successful movements.  Many of the executives that I work with me gave me quizzical looks. They asked, “Why are you writing about movements? You’re a business consultant. What does this have to do with business?”

Good questions. Let me see if I can offer some answers.

Movements and companies – what’s the intersection between these two? Sure, there are movements against companies – we all can name dozens of boycotts against specific companies for a variety of reasons, ranging from unfair labor practices to the politics of the countries they’re from. Even the labor movement that gave rise to Labor Day was at one level a movement against companies. But, what about companies that are catalysts and drivers of movements of their own? How many of those can you name?

There’s something unnatural about the question. Companies aren’t movements and movements aren’t companies. We all know that.

I want to suggest something a bit heretical. Maybe it’s time to call for a new set of movements – this time initiated by companies, but engaging large segments of the population in a collaborative quest to discover new ways to create value in an increasingly challenging economy.

Before I develop the reasoning for this, let me step back and quickly re-cap the definition of movement that I offered in my earlier blog posting. I suggested that a movement is “an organized effort mobilizing a large number of independent participants in a grassroots effort to pursue a broad agenda for change.”

The Big Shift

So, again, what does this have to do with companies? As I’ve written elsewhere, we’re in the early stages of a Big Shift that profoundly changes how we do business.  We’re only beginning to understand the new practices and institutional arrangements that will lead to success in this Big Shift.  But one thing we know for sure: the new practices and institutional arrangements will require significant movement from where companies are today. (If you doubt this, see the significant long-term erosion in ROA for all U.S. public companies since 1965).

Now, companies can undertake this journey in isolation or they can invite others to join them in a movement of mutual discovery.  If we try to make this journey in isolation, it will be a lot more challenging. No matter how smart we are in any single firm, we’ll likely be a lot more successful if we enlist the help of others outside our firms and motivate them to make the journey with us.

This is especially true if, as we’ve suggested in the past, one key dimension of the journey is the shift from an institutional rationale of scalable efficiency to one of scalable learning.  It’s not surprising that companies and movements were viewed as so different in the past.  Scalable efficiency fostered a quest to bring activities inside the four walls of an enterprise and to organize them as efficiently as possible. If outsiders were needed for anything (and inevitably they were, since no firm is completely self-sufficient) the focus was on reducing the number of participants from the outside and carefully dictating their activities to enhance efficiency.

Scalable learning changes all that. If we’re seriously committed to learning at scale, we’re inexorably pulled beyond the four walls of our enterprise and drawn to connect with an expanding array of other participants who can help us to learn faster. In other words, we’re drawn to join, or organize, movements.

It may not be an exaggeration to say that movement of this magnitude requires a movement to significantly increase the odds of success. But, here’s the problem. Most companies don’t yet see the need for help (except, of course, for the ever generous subsidies from our government) and the few who see the need for help would be loath to admit it publicly.

But that’s just the point.  The few companies who see the need for help and are willing to be vulnerable and express that need just might differentiate themselves in a powerful way from their struggling colleagues.  And they might find that they pull together a growing number of people and institutions who can be extremely helpful in exploring new pathways towards much more powerful value creation.

Movements shaped by companies

So, what would such a movement look like? Well, we’re not talking about the conventional “corporate social responsibility” movement that’s driven by some noble purpose above and beyond the company. We’re talking about the future of the company – re-inventing its core rationale so that it can turn the mounting pressure of the Big Shift into growing success.

But, it can’t just be about the company itself. One way of thinking about the Big Shift is that it’s a movement from an era when individuals had to find ways to fit into the pre-determined slots established by our institutions to one where our institutions will need to find ways to organize around individuals. In this respect, movements are just a natural extension of this new reality – and companies will need to find ways to spawn and participate in movements.

It’s about identifying an opportunity for the company and others to come together to create something of much greater value than the company ever could on its own.  And, it’s about finding a common purpose that can motivate and mobilize many others beyond the company to participate in a shared quest.  It’s ultimately about creating an environment for scalable learning where all participants can learn faster and achieve more of what is valuable to them.

What would we need to do that? Well, as I suggested in my earlier post, successful movements of any type are built on two key foundations: (1) a powerful and engaging narrative and (2) a creation space that focuses on accelerating the learning of a growing number of small groups committed to making a growing difference in their arenas of action.

The role of narrative

Just to re-cap, I drew a sharp distinction between stories and narratives. I suggested that stories are self-contained (they have a beginning, middle and resolution) and they're about the story teller or some other people, they're not about the listener.  In contrast, narratives are open-ended, they are yet to be resolved and their resolution depends upon the choices and actions of the listener.  As a result, they're a powerful call to action, emphasizing the ability that we all have to make a difference.

Now, here’s the problem.  As I discussed here, here and here, very few companies have anything resembling a narrative. At best, they have an open-ended story about how they had humble beginnings, faced enormous obstacles and achieved extraordinary things, with much more to come. It’s still a story about them – the only thing that people outside the company are supposed to do is stand back in awe and await the accomplishments ahead. It’s certainly not a call to action, except perhaps to buy more of the company’s products.

An effective corporate narrative would identify an opportunity that’s beyond the reach of a company today, an opportunity not just for the company, but for many, many others. An opportunity so great that it can’t be achieved in isolation but requires collective action. It would move others to join forces and take action in powerful new ways. What would such an opportunity look like?

Well, in the context of the Big Shift, such a narrative might focus on harnessing the exponential opportunities made possible by the forces driving the Big Shift. Depending on the market or industry, it could be the opportunity to generate unprecedented economic value and wealth, the opportunity to achieve levels of wellness and longevity that were previously unimaginable, the opportunity to discover and express one’s unique individuality and expand impact by connecting with others, or the opportunity to nurture our children so that they can achieve previously unimaginable levels of impact. These are just some of the possible opportunities that a narrative might focus.

The role of creation spaces

But articulating an opportunity is only a first step. A movement requires action and creation spaces are powerful ways to amplify action.  As I discussed in more detail in my earlier post on movements, creation spaces help to organize activities in ways that accelerate learning. The basic organizational unit of a creation space is a small group of people. These people come together and collaborate in ways that help them individually and collectively to achieve higher levels of impact. Through this collaboration, they form deep trust-based relationships within their group because they're sharing their vulnerabilities in a quest to learn from each other. The real power of a creation space is that it creates an environment that can scale in ways that help the small groups to learn even faster by connecting with each other.  

Companies can play a powerful role in catalyzing, nurturing and scaling these creation spaces. The key here is to move beyond organizing communities of interest (something that I wrote about extensively in Net Gain) and focus on organizing communities of action. Note also that these creation spaces are quite different from conventional crowdsourcing efforts that are usually focused on narrowly defined tasks or problems. In creation spaces, the opportunity is open-ended and invites the sustained collaboration of large numbers of individuals coming together in small groups that form deep, trust-based relationships as they experiment and improvise approaches to expand their impact.

The benefits of movements

But, what’s in all this for companies? As I mentioned earlier, the Big Shift is requiring all companies to pursue models of scalable learning that extend far beyond their own four walls. Movements shaped by narratives and creation spaces can become powerful engines of scalable learning.  By mobilizing a large number of third parties, movements create rich environments to accomplish the following:

• Distributed innovation – Lots of groups proceeding in parallel, each pursuing different approaches towards a shared opportunity, can become a much more powerful engine for innovation than a single company proceeding in isolation

• Accelerated learning and performance improvement – As the smaller groups share their results and see which approaches are yielding higher impact and which approaches a falling short, they can learn much faster than if they just focus on their own efforts and move to higher and higher levels of performance

• Leveraged growth – Properly framed, these movements can mobilize the resources and capabilities of a very diverse set of participants to generate far more economic value at far lower cost than the traditional “make versus buy” approaches to growth

• Shaping strategies – These movements can profoundly restructure entire markets or industries, pulling companies out of a short-term reactive posture and positioning them to build positions of competitive advantage that will be very difficult to attack.

• Deeper and more sustained relationships – By building trust and focusing participants on a long-term opportunity, these movements can quickly move companies out of their largely short-term transactional relationships with customers and other third parties. These deeper relationships in turn amplify the conditions for even more rapid innovation, learning, performance improvement and growth, setting into motion an increasing returns dynamic that will be hard to resist.

• Greater passion among participants – As I’ve discussed elsewhere, a specific form of passion – the passion of the explorer – is becoming more and more central to scaling learning and accelerating performance improvement in increasingly uncertain environments. Movements built upon compelling narratives and high impact creation spaces are powerful catalysts for this kind of passion.

Bottom line

The Big Shift can't be addressed in isolation. To make the transition from mounting performance pressure to exponential opportunity, institutions will need to catalyze broader movements, pulling in more and more participants over time to pursue a shared opportunity. If done right, small moves smartly made can set very big things in motion.

To get started, companies should focus on five questions:

• What is a narrative with the power to engage and mobilize the participants that will be most helpful in embarking on a quest to achieve a shared opportunity?

• Where are these participants gathering today in communities of interest and how can we pull them into communities of action where the goal is not just to learn about something but to actually achieve greater and greater impact within a specific domain?

• How can we reduce barriers to entry for participation in this movement?

• What tools or resources can we provide to these creation spaces to accelerate and expand impact?

• What metrics can we develop to determine whether this movement is achieving more and more impact and to provide a compass for the participants we’re mobilizing?

Making a Movement: Narratives and Creation Spaces

What better day than Labor Day in the US to explore movements and narratives? Labor Day emerged directly from the powerful labor movement in the US. Throughout history, we’ve had a lot of movements that have shaped our economic, social and political arenas.

I believe we’re on the cusp of a new wave of movements. These new movements will be built on two solid pillars – compelling narratives and nurturing creation spaces. In this post, I’ll explore the role that both of these pillars play in generating movements that can make a difference. Narratives help to provide motivation and focus while creation spaces help to harness scalable learning.

What is a movement?

Here we run into the inevitable challenge of semantics – movement, like many words in our language, is used very loosely and can mean many things. One dictionary defines a movement as “an organized effort to promote or attain an end.” This suggests two key elements: intentionality and organization. There must be an intent or goal that provides the rationale for a movement to exist and there must be some degree of organization to help focus collaborative effort to achieve that intent or goal.

But, like many definitions, this one has limitations. For example, by this definition, all corporations would have to be considered movements – they’re all working to promote an end, whether it be shareholder value increase or enhancing the delight of the customers they’re seeking to address.

So, let’s modify the definition a bit to capture the kind of movement I have in mind: “an organized effort mobilizing a large number of independent participants in a grassroots effort to pursue a broad agenda for change.” That certainly encompasses the labor movement that gave rise to Labor Day, as well as such well-known movements as the evangelical movement, the Civil Rights movement, the anti-Vietnam War movement, the women’s movement and the Tea Party movement.

The rise and fall of movements in the US

It’s interesting that movements were once central to American history, but they seem to have been marginalized in recent years. At least, that’s the implication of Google’s NGram analysis which shows that the usage of the term in books increased by almost 15 fold in a steady rise between 1800 and 1973, when it peaked, and then began a long and sustained decline of 25% over the past four decades.

What happened? Perhaps it’s a reflection of the passivity that our mass market society has instilled in us. When there’s mounting pressure to make a living and so much to see and experience outside of work, who has time to focus on a sustained program of change? And besides, it’s all futile any way. Hipster cynicism suggests it’s all a waste of time – far better to savor the kale salad and that interesting new Chardonnay. If it’s something short and sweet, like dumping an ice bucket on our head or posting a pledge on Facebook, sure, we might be lured into doing that, but just don’t expect any sustained effort.

Here’s the paradox – movements become more and more feasible given rapidly improving technology infrastructures that can help us to connect with each other and collaborate in rich ways across great distances. Yet, it’s exactly at this time that movements seem to be either receding or floundering.

Time for a change

Maybe, just maybe, it’s time to revive the term and explore opportunities to bring a growing number of us together to drive meaningful change. We just might tap into that growing dissatisfaction on the edge of society with the passive consumerism and celebrity voyeurism that has defined our culture in recent decades.

Pockets of people are beginning to say “Basta!” and wanting to become more active “makers” of the products and experiences that shape their lives. Others are challenging the “wisdom” that one should go to work to earn a paycheck and save whatever passion they might have for after-hours hobbies or friends.

What would we need to see a resurgence of movements? Two things will need to come together and, when they do, they’ll provide a powerful antidote to the passivity and cynicism that dominates much of our lives today. Those two things are: narratives and creation spaces. I’ve written a lot in the past about both of these, but I’ve never really tied these two together and certainly haven’t addressed them in the context of movements.

The power of narratives

I began my exploration of narratives in contrast to stories here. To briefly recap, I’ve suggested that stories are self-contained (they have a beginning, middle and resolution) and they're about the story teller or some other people, they're not about the listener. In contrast, narratives are open-ended, they are yet to be resolved and their resolution depends upon the choices and actions of the listener. As a result, they're a powerful call to action, emphasizing the ability that we all have to make a difference. If you want to move people to action, narratives are a powerful way to get people off their sofas and into the streets.

Stories are very emotionally powerful but narratives are far more powerful. Throughout history millions of people have given their lives – the ultimate act of sacrifice – on behalf of narratives.

Narratives are also a powerful way to address the cognitive biases that grip us in times of high uncertainty and rapid change. In these times, we tend to magnify perception of risk and discount perception of reward, shorten our time horizons, fall into zero sum views of the world (it’s a win/lose world) and lose trust in those around us.

Opportunity based narratives can change all that – they magnify our perception of reward, lengthen our time horizons, highlight the potential for a positive sum world (where the total value is increasing) and strengthen our ability to trust those who are on a shared quest – all key requirements for successful movements

As I’ve suggested before, narratives are also powerful vehicles to catalyze and amplify the passion of the explorer. Three attributes define the passion of the explorer – a long-term commitment to making an increasing contribution to a domain, a questing disposition that is excited by new challenges and a connecting disposition that seeks to find and collaborate with others in addressing these challenges. If you want to build a successful movement, wouldn’t you want to instil this kind of passion in its participants?

Look at every successful movement for change throughout history – its foundation was built on a compelling and energizing opportunity based narrative that moved people to come together and act. We could learn a lot by analyzing these narratives and understanding how they might help us to craft new narratives to accomplish even greater things today.

The power of creation spaces

Narratives can be powerful catalysts for movements but they’re not sufficient. Movements really take off when they’re combined with a distinctive form of organization – something that I’ve called creation spaces.

Creation spaces help to organize activities in ways that accelerate learning. The basic organizational unit of a creation space is a small group of people who come together and collaborate in ways that help them individually and collectively to achieve higher levels of impact. Through this collaboration, they form deep trust-based relationships within their group because they are sharing their vulnerabilities in a quest to learn from each other. These small groups multiply and take a lot of local initiative – they’re constantly experimenting and improvising in an effort to discover ways to achieve more impact.

These small groups are very effective in driving learning, but they have one critical limitation – they don’t scale. Once they grow beyond 10 to 20 participants, they tend to fragment and weaken the deep trust-based relationships that are so critical to driving the learning process.

The real power of a creation space is that it creates an environment that can scale in ways that help the small groups to learn even faster by connecting with each other. These small groups learn from each other through a variety of mechanisms, ranging from regular gatherings of participants across groups to online discussion forums where participants in one group can ask questions and get advice from participants in other groups about a particular challenge they’re facing.If you want to know more about creation spaces, I’ve written extensively about them in “The Power of Pull.”

I originally came across creation spaces in arenas where you see sustained extreme performance improvement – arenas as diverse as extreme sports like big wave surfing and online video games like World of Warcraft. As diverse as these arenas were, they spawned environments with a set of common characteristics designed to scale learning so that the more participants who join in, the faster everyone learns. We begin to see collaboration curves in action.

I had been exploring creation spaces for quite some time but never made the connection to movements until I read an article by Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker on “The Cellular Church.” His article addressed a key misconception about the evangelical movement. The media tends to focus on the mega-churches of pastors like Rick Warren where the faithful gather every Sunday by the thousands to worship together. Gladwell urged readers to pay attention to where the real action is in the evangelical movement – small groups of faithful who come together in “cells” and often meet a couple of times each week. The goal of these groups is to work together to develop practices that can increase their impact in their local community – their focus is on action and learning from that action. The participants in these small groups then come together on Sunday and in other forums to share their experiences and learn from the experiences of others.

This article really resonated with me. It certainly was exciting as yet another example of the creation space model of organization. It also reminded me of my days in the anti-Vietnam War movement of the 1960s where the focus of action was not in the massive street demonstrations which drew all the media attention, but in the local chapters of SDS and similar groups that were meeting and acting on a much more frequent basis to inform and mobilize people in a growing range of acts of resistance. And the more I researched other successful social movements, the more I saw this same pattern of organization in action.

The interplay between narratives and creation spaces

What’s really interesting to me is how narratives and creation spaces reinforce and amplify each other.

Narratives provide the context and shared purpose that pull others into the movement and keep them motivated and focused as they encounter and deal with the myriad of unexpected obstacles standing in the way of meaningful change. Creation spaces provide an environment that encourages and supports local initiative in collaboration with others while also providing a much richer set of resources that these local groups can draw on, and learn from, as they mount their local initiatives.

The more rapidly participants at the local level learn, the richer the overarching narrative becomes, both regarding the nature of the opportunity ahead and the journey that participants will need to make in order to achieve that opportunity. The more compelling the narrative becomes, the more it draws in others to participate and learn from each other.

Bottom line

So, let’s say we’re interested in reviving movements as engines of social change. What are some tangible first steps that we might take? This is worthy of a series of blog postings, but let me start with some brief suggestions, all driven by one of my mantras: “small moves, smartly made, can set big things in motion.”

First, bring together a small group of like-minded individuals and take on the task of crafting a short but compelling narrative that highlights the nature of the opportunity ahead, the forces that are making this opportunity more viable and the obstacles that are likely to make it challenging to achieve this opportunity. If it’s going to be an opportunity based narrative (and it should), be sure to avoid falling into “oppositional” mindsets and languages – remember, it’s now what you’re against but what you’re for.

Second, circulate this draft narrative to a larger group of people and invite their suggestions for refinement and improvement.

Third, as people begin to indicate their support for this narrative and the opportunity it describes, encourage them to find others in their local community who might share an interest in collaborating on this adventure. Encourage them to meet and identify some actions that they might quickly take to begin the journey. As they take these actions, encourage them to reflect on what’s working and what’s not working and how they might refine these actions to achieve even greater impact.

Fourth, create some shared discussion forums/workspaces where these people can share their stories of success and the lessons they’ve learned along the way. Remember, we can learn as much, if not more, from our failures as our successes. Willingness to share failures also helps to build trust.

Then, stand back and watch what happens. Double down in areas where you seem to be gaining traction and be alert to emerging unmet needs within the movement to see what you can do to help others achieve even more impact and accelerate their learning.

Just remember – the key to the success of movements is movement. Talking and theorizing is fine but only if it leads to action. Action is helpful, but only if it is focused and directed towards a shared goal. The real power emerges when theory and action combine to change the world.

Shift Happens

I’m writing to announce an edge initiative from the Center for the Edge. It’s the publication of a really, really short book, “Shift Happens”, written by John Seely Brown, Duleesha Kulasooriya and me (with the significant help of our crew at the Center), now available on Amazon (bulk orders available here).

We all know that most executives are pressed for time – it’s one of the main reasons companies fall into the “short-termism” trap. Who has time to pay attention to long-term trends? We all want the “sound-bite” or the executive summary that gives the key points and the “so-whats” in a fast, concise and compelling way.

In our quest to fight “short-termism”, we’ve been evangelizing the “long view.” We trade in paradox – one of our key beliefs is that the long view is increasingly essential to drive short-term success. Focusing just on the short-term will actually lead to short-term failure.

So, the Center for the Edge has been investing heavily to explore the “Big Shift”, the long-term forces that have been playing out for decades and are re-shaping the global business landscape in profound ways. We’ve written a lot about this and, starting in five years ago, we’ve been publishing a “Shift Index” with 25 metrics that will help executives to better understand the rate of progress of the Big Shift.

But, here’s the problem. Who has the time to read what we’ve written? Yes, a brave minority of you have carved out the time to dive into the details. And, for that, we’re grateful. But what about the rest of you?

With “Shift Happens,” we’re trying something new.

In a very few pages with a very few words on each page, we focus on the broad themes of the Big Shift:

• What are the two key forces that are shaping the global business landscape?

• What are the three most important shifts that are occurring as a result of these forces?

• What are the three things that we all need to do to turn mounting performance pressure into expanding opportunity?

Our goal isn’t just to make sense of what’s happening around us – we want to help all of us make progress in harnessing these forces to create powerful new forms of wealth.

One key point: this isn’t just about the future; it’s about today. We’re working harder and harder and performing less and less well because we’re stuck in old ways of doing business, rather than seeing and shifting to the new ways of doing business that are available to us now.

At the risk of over-simplifying, the choice is extinction or evolution. While extinction may not happen tomorrow, the sooner we make this choice, the better off we’ll be.

So, what choice will we make? The time to decide is now, not tomorrow. “Shift Happens” will help. And spread the word – your friends and colleagues will thank you for it.

Based on your feedback, we’ve got several more of these really, really short books on the way. Edgy idea, but then again . . .

(And, yes, this is the shortest blog post I've ever written!)

Platforms Are Not Created Equal: Harnessing the Full Potential of Platforms

Platforms are becoming increasingly central to business value creation.  Yet, not all platforms are created equal – some platforms have far more potential to trigger powerful forms of increasing returns that will ultimately marginalize other forms of platforms. In a rapidly evolving environment, it’s important to understand not just the structure, but the dynamics, of different kinds of platforms. I recently had an opportunity to step back and reflect on this issue as I prepared for a speaking engagement.

I had the good fortune of being invited to speak at the Platform Strategy Summit held at the MIT Media Lab a couple of weeks ago. This Summit was organized by Geoffrey Parker, Marshall Van Alstyne and Sangeet Choudary – three guys who have spent a lot of time studying and working with platform-based businesses. There were great speakers and, perhaps equally important, the audience included a lot of people who have been building platform-based businesses.

What is a platform?

So, what did I learn? Well, first of all, that platforms, at least as the organizers think of them, cover a broad range of institutional arrangements. It was clear that they didn't simply view platforms as technology platforms. In fact, the definition they offer of business platforms is: “a nexus of rules and
infrastructure that facilitate interactions among network users” or, alternatively, “a published standard, together with a governance model, that facilitates third party participation.”

Just to get the semantics aside, I tend to prefer the term “performance ecosystems” to describe this space rather than platforms simply because, to me, the term “platforms” creates an image of a much more tightly designed and specified environment than the term “performance ecosystems.” For the purpose of this posting, though, I’ll defer to my hosts and use the term "platform" since it’s clear from their definition that they are talking about roughly the same domains.

So, are all platforms created equal? I argued in my talk that they are not. To make my case, I distinguished four different categories of platforms that are becoming increasingly prominent in the business world (and elsewhere).  

Aggregation platforms

The basic focus of these platforms is to bring together a broad array of relevant resources and help users of the platform to connect with the most appropriate resources.  We can think of data aggregation platforms, marketplaces and broker platforms like eBay and Etsy, and contest platforms like InnoCentive or Kaggle.  These platforms tend to be very transaction or task focused – the key is to express a need, get a response, do the deal and move on.  They also tend to operate on a hub and spoke model – all the transactions are brokered by the platform owner and organizer.

Social platforms

These are similar to aggregation platforms in the sense of aggregating a lot of people – think of all the broad-based social platforms we’ve come to know and love: Facebook, Twitter, etc.  Social platforms also include more tightly defined communities of interest that come together around specific shared interests like certain genres of music, types of sports or academic disciplines like history or economics. They differ from aggregation platforms on some key dimensions.  First, they end up building and reinforcing long-term relationships across participants on the platform – it’s not just about doing a transaction or a task but getting to know people around areas of common interest.  Second, they tend to foster mesh networks of relationships rather than hub and spoke interactions – people connect with each other over time in much richer and diverse ways that usually do not involve the platform organizer or owner.

Mobilization platforms

Now, we’re talking about something more than individual tasks or networks of relationships around common interests.  Mobilization platforms ultimately focus on mobilizing participants to engage in some kind of collaborative effort that will take considerable time to accomplish.  Here, we can think about open source software platforms like Linux or Apache.  There are also “process network” platforms that bring together participants in extended business processes like supply networks or distribution operations that help to select and orchestrate participants who need to collaborate in flexible ways over time.  We might also think of mobilization platforms that support social movements like the Arab Spring movement.  Bottom line, these platforms are not just about conversations and interests, they are ultimately focused on moving people to act together to accomplish something beyond the capabilities of any individual participant.

Because of the need for collaborative action over time, these platforms tend to foster longer-term relationships rather than focusing on isolated and short-term transactions or tasks. But the key focus here is to connect with, and mobilize, a given set of people and resources to achieve a shared goal.  The participants, in other words, are often viewed as “static resources” – they have a given set of individual capabilities and the challenge is to mobilize these fixed capabilities to achieve the longer-term goal.

Learning platforms

Now, it starts to get interesting.  These platforms have as their explicit goal to create environments where participants can learn faster and individually achieve higher and higher levels of performance as more and more participants join the platform. These platforms are what I've called “creation spaces” in some earlier work.  They have a distinctive configuration.  

Their primary unit of organization is a small team or work group that takes on particular performance challenges and where participants work closely together to come up with creative new ways to address the performance challenge.  The emphasis on small teams or work groups is essential because the focus is on a powerful form of learning that involves accessing tacit knowledge. This in turn requires the formation of deep, trust based relationships.  These relationships evolve quickly in small teams or workgroups but are very challenging to scale.

That’s where the second key element of creation spaces comes in – they provide participants with ways to connect with each other beyond the individual team or workgroup to ask questions, share experiences, and get advice.

To my knowledge, there are very few examples of these creation spaces in business, but we can find very large scale creation spaces in arenas as diverse as online war games (for example, World of Warcraft) and online platforms to help musicians develop and refine their remixing skills (ccMixter). They also have emerged in a broad array of extreme sports arenas, including big wave surfing and extreme skiing.

As with social platforms and mobilization platforms, learning platforms critically depend on the ability to build long-term relationships rather than simply focusing on short-term transactions or tasks. Unlike the other platforms, though, learning platforms explicitly do not view participants as “static resources.” On the contrary, they start with the presumption that all participants have the opportunity to draw out more and more of their potential if given the right environment.

Doubling network effects

Let’s be clear.  All four of these platform categories have the potential to create significant economic value for the platform owner and for the participants.  All four have the potential to tap into network effects – the value created by the platform accelerates as more and more participants join the platform. Of course, the flip side of this is that, until and unless the platform draws in a critical mass of participants, it will have only minimal value to participants.  That’s why the vast majority of platform initiatives end up failing – the very thing that creates value once the critical mass is achieved, diminishes value before that point.

But, the fourth category of platform offers a second level of network effect, one th
at is uniquely associated with that platform.  To understand this, it’s useful to go back to the somewhat outdated example used to describe network effects: the fax machine. If you only have one fax machine, it has negative value – you paid money for it and it does nothing.  The more fax machines that are connected, the more valuable each fax machine becomes.  But, in that example, the individual fax machine is a static resource – its features and functions are a given and don’t change as the number of fax machines multiplies. The increasing value comes from its connections with other machines.

What if we change the assumption, though?  What if each fax machine acquired more features and functions as it connected with more fax machines? What if its features multiplied at a faster rate as more fax machines joined the network? Now, we’d have a second level of network effect – we’d still have the network effects that come by simply increasing the number of fax machines, but now there’s an additional network effect that accrues as each fax machine adds more and more features as a result of interacting with other fax machines.

That’s the potential of learning platforms.  In a world of mounting performance pressure and accelerating change as described in our Shift Index, that learning potential isn’t just an opportunity, it becomes an imperative.  Those platforms that don’t help participants to learn faster and faster as they work together will tend to be marginalized over time, especially once learning platforms become more prevalent. And this also applies to the participants. If we choose to participate on platforms that are not explicitly driven to accelerate learning, we’ll learn at a slower rate than participants who choose to spend their time on learning platforms.

I also want to be clear that learning can and does occur on all four of the platforms, but on the first three platforms, it occurs as an unintended byproduct of participation on the platform. In the course of a conversation with someone on a social network, I'll often learn something new – but this is incidental and tends to be learning in the form of knowledge transfer.  Knowledge transfer is inherently a diminishing returns game – the more the knowledge spreads across participants, the more the rate of learning will slow down. The only thing that can turn this from a diminishing returns game to an increasing returns game is to shift the focus from knowledge transfer to knowledge creation.

Platforms that are explicitly designed to drive new knowledge creation through collaborative efforts offer the potential for increasing returns to learning – we’ll learn faster as more and more diverse participants join the platform, especially if we can combine the learning that occurs within high performing teams and workgroups with the learning that comes from connecting across a broader environment.

Bottom line

Which platform would you rather be on? In my book, The Power of Pull, I make the case that we're moving to a world where value creation will depend on harnessing the power of scalable pull platforms, where we can draw out the people and resources that we need, when we need them and where we need them.  The highest form of pull platform is the learning platform – one that helps all participants to learn faster as more and more participants join in.

The good news from a platform owner perspective is that any of the first three categories of platforms can evolve to become learning platforms over time. But, it will likely not happen on its own. It requires thoughtful observation of where the opportunities for learning might be and initiatives to create more functionality on the platform to support and accelerate learning processes.

Four questions become central to harnessing the power of accelerating learning on platforms:

• What is the primary design objective of the platform today – aggregation, social, mobilization or learning?
• Where are there opportunities to accelerate learning (especially through new knowledge creation) among participants today?
• What features or design principles could we deploy to help tap into those learning opportunities today?
• What are the metrics that we could track to determine the rate of learning and how can we monitor those metrics on an ongoing basis to refine our initiatives and accelerate learning even more among participants?

Where Do You Stand? The Shifting Ground of Strategy

We’re all trying our best to remain standing, but the ground beneath us is shifting at an accelerating rate. The implications for strategy are profound, but few have explored this terrain.

Strategies of position are back

Strategy was once all about position – all that mattered was where you were located and whether there were barriers to entry. As structural advantages eroded, this view of strategy fell out of vogue. In its place, we heard all about strategies of movement and capability – it was all about your “core competencies” and how quickly you could move across a changing landscape. Now, it looks like strategies of position will reassert themselves with a vengeance.

What do I mean by that? There’s no question that the ground is shifting – for more on that, see our Shift Index. But, here’s the paradox, at the very same time that the ground is shifting, it matters more and more where we’re standing.

We’ve just released a major new research report at the Center for the Edge – The Hero’s Journey through the Landscape of the Future – which focuses on one fundamental shift that will impact an increasing array of businesses.  Specifically, we look at trends towards fragmentation and concentration in the economy. What parts of the economy are fragmenting into smaller and smaller entities and what parts of the economy are concentrating into larger and larger entities?  The answer to this question is vitally important to executives yet few are explicitly asking this question, much less answering it in any systematic way.

Position shapes growth potential

If you’re an executive in a large company under pressure to achieve more growth or if you’re an executive in a smaller company seeking to achieve high rates of growth, where you stand matters hugely. If you’re in a part of the economy that’s fragmenting, growth will become increasingly challenging. Ultimately you’ll find yourself trapped in a spiral of shrinking share and eroding economics.  On the other hand, if you’re in a part of the economy that’s concentrating, growth can be amplified and sustained by riding the waves that are driving concentration. Position suddenly matters big time.

So, the choice of ground that you’re standing on matters.  But there’s a second way that position is becoming more important. In our research, we discovered that winners in the concentrating parts of the economy are increasingly determined by the ability to connect with, and build strong relationships with, the participants who are operating in fragmenting parts of the economy.  Look at Amazon. Its increasing growth – both in its online retail business and its newer cloud platform – has been driven by an ability to attract and support a growing array of smaller players who can benefit from the economies of scale and scope offered by Amazon. Or take Google. Its core economic engine – its advertising network – critically depends upon the value it provides to smaller merchants and smaller content websites.  

This suggests another dimension of position which will increasingly determine the ability to generate growing economic value.  Where you’re positioned in expanding business ecosystems matters a lot. If you’re on the periphery, with few connections to players in the fragmented part of the economy, good luck.  If you’re at the center of a growing cluster of relationships where more and more participants are seeking to connect with you, now you’re in a great position to drive the economies of scale and scope that will make you one of the winners in concentrating parts of the economy.

Position within ecosystems drives leveraged growth potential.  In a world of mounting performance pressure, growth alone is not sufficient.  The key is how much investment is required to drive this growth.  The two conventional approaches to growth – organic growth and growth through acquisition – are very resource intensive, requiring significant upfront investment, long lead-times and uncertain rewards.  Far better to explore leveraged growth, a third path to growth – connecting with, and mobilizing, complementary resources and capabilities that can add significant value to your customers.

And let’s not forget those who just want to make a living

By the way, position also matters if you have more modest aspirations and simply want to build a small and successful business that will support you in pursuing your passion. Far better to be thoughtful in picking a part of the economy that is fragmenting and that will support and reward smaller businesses providing distinctive and focused value. If you pick a part of the economy that is concentrating, watch out! You'll soon be run over by larger companies that will have distinct advantage over the small fry they crush along the way.

And, just as with larger businesses, you also need to be systematic in picking and participating in broader ecosystems that will help you to amplify the value that you deliver to the market. Just look at the growing array of small, niche product business that are emerging from platforms like eBay, Etsy and YouTube – part of their ability to sustain themselves comes from their participation in these platforms that help them to find and connect with customers around the world. Few, if any, of these businesses will grow to become large, public companies, but that’s precisely the point – they are homesteading fragmenting parts of the economy that will be fertile ground for small businesses but at the same time that make it challenging to grow into very large companies.

What about core competencies?

So, am I suggesting that position is everything and that movement and “core competencies” don’t matter? Far from it.  All I’m suggesting is that position is a pre-requisite for success if your goal is to deliver sustained levels of high growth.  If you’re not positioned in the right places in the economy, you’ll find growth more and more challenging, no matter how smart and agile you are.

If you’re focused on parts of the economy that are concentrating, there’s a fundamental challenge: concentration implies that there will be fewer and fewer winners over time – it’s a “winner takes all” proposition.  So, how do you prevail against all the others that have their eye on the same spot?

Here’s where core competency comes in.  You’ve got to be really, really good – distinctively good – at the skills and practices required to succeed in concentrating parts of the economy. But I take core competency to another level (see my article in Harvard Business Review on “Unbundling the Corporation”) – you’ve got to be so focused on your core competency that you would be well advised to shed all other activities from your company.  If you try to hold onto things that you’re just good enough in or even where you have parity with others, you’ll just consume resources and attention that could be better used in deepening and broadening your core competency.  

One of the great things about our evolving economy is that you can increasingly find and connect to companies that are world-class in whatever business activities you need to support your business.  If that’s the case, why would you ever continue to do things that others can do better?

And what about movement?

Here’s another reason to maintain a ruthless focus on your core competence. In our exponentially changing world, core competence is never static.  If you’re not totally focused on accelerating learning and performance improvement in your core competence, you’ll soon fall far behind, no matter how good you are at it today.  As I’ve discussed elsewhere, scalable learning becomes the key requirement for continued success.  

This is where movement becomes central to success.  You can’t just stand still. But, on the other hand, you’d better not fall into the trap of random, reactive movement that’s so tempting in a time of rapid change – simply sensing and responding to the latest event on the horizon.  The movement must be directed by a clear view of what capabilities will be critical to success and how those capabilities are likely to evolve in a changing business landscape.

That provides the context for driving learning, both within your organization and across a broader ecosystem.  And, make no mistake about it, if all you do is focus on learning within the four walls of your firm, you’ve already lost. The key to scaling learning is to be able to reach out beyond your enterprise and find ways to connect with world-class participants in a broad array of complementary domains in ways that will help all participants to learn faster.

And, that’s again where position matters. If you’re not positioned centrally in a broad array of relevant ecosystems, you’ll be at a disadvantage relative to those who are. But you need to do more. You need to build relationships that will make it easier for you to access the tacit knowledge that others have and then focus those relationships on addressing really challenging performance issues.  This requires movement, but it’s focused movement, driven by rapid iterations of effort and frequent pauses to reflect collectively on what’s working and what’s not working from the performance improvement initiatives. In an exponential world, if you’re not constantly moving in this fashion, you’ll soon die.

So, in the end, movement and core competency still matter.  But they’ll only matter if you have picked the right position on the business landscape – a position that will foster and amplify growth. Position is a pre-requisite for everything else. Ignore it at your peril.  

Bottom line

Here are four questions that should be on every CEO’s agenda:

• Am I focused on portions of the business landscape that are concentrating or fragmenting?
• Am I participating in ecosystems that will help me to amplify the value that I am delivering to the market?
• Am I sufficiently focused on the (few) core competencies that will drive competitive success?
• Am I doing everything I can to accelerate and scale learning so that I won’t be blindsided in an exponential world?

For a lot more insight into why these questions matter and into approaches to addressing these questions, please see our working paper available here.

A 21st Century Global Declaration of Independence

When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for individuals to dissolve the institutional bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of humankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all individuals are created equal and are endowed with the right to be able to achieve as much of their potential as possible. History, despite periodic setbacks, has been marked by a rapidly accelerating trend towards providing individuals and communities with more and more opportunity to achieve that potential.

We find ourselves now at a crossroads in history. The institutions – commercial, educational, political and civic – that we created in an earlier era in an effort to expand our potential have now become increasingly significant barriers to progress. It is not surprising that our trust in these institutions is plummeting around the world. We see so much opportunity and yet the institutions that are supposed to be helping us are increasingly standing in our way.

In response to this impasse, we are coming together around the world to build a new set of institutional platforms that will help to establish our independence from the institutions of the past. These new institutions bear little resemblance to the institutions they are designed to replace, and they are extraordinarily diverse, but they share a set of common characteristics:

Goals

• They seek to draw out of each of us more of our true potential

• They actively seek to help us connect with our passion and view passion as a key to unlocking increasing opportunity, rather than viewing it with suspicion as something that is unpredictable and resists “getting with the program”

• They seek to connect us in richer and more diverse ways with others – both inside and outside the institution – who can help us to pursue our passion and to achieve more of our potential

Approaches

• They embrace diversity in all of its manifestations and create the conditions for productive friction by challenging us with aggressive performance goals so that this diversity can lead to more creative outcomes

• They nurture the feminine archetype that resides in all of us and encourage us to shed the masculine archetype that has driven our institutions to date

• They create environments where we can be vulnerable and focus on important questions, rather than pretending to always have the right answers

• They encourage us individually and collectively to experiment, tinker and innovate in coming up with new, innovative approaches to the problems and opportunities we see ahead

• They find ways to manage risk so that the consequences of failure are contained, thereby encouraging us to experiment with new and better approaches

• They encourage us to create – and reward these creations with social capital that becomes more and more meaningful relative to financial capital

• They focus on building reputation mechanisms that both recognize creative achievements and contributions and provide a way for others who share our interests to more effectively find and connect with us

Organization

• They adopt modular and loosely coupled approaches to organizing activity to provide the maximum space for creativity and innovation in all parts of the institution

• They decentralize and federate decision-making so that we each have much more ability to shape our local institutional environments

• They focus explicitly and aggressively on building and participating in ever expanding ecosystems of institutions and individuals that can help to leverage their own resources and help everyone to learn faster by working together

Bottom line, these institutions are designed around individuals – to help the people within them and around them to flourish. This stands in sharp contrast to our existing institutions that are designed around standardized tasks and that demand we conform to the institutional “boxes” that have been assigned to us.

We have no desire to confront existing institutions head on. We have no desire to engage in battle unless existing institutions seek to undermine or destroy the new institutional platforms that we are building. We prefer instead to focus on building parallel institutions on the edge of existing institutions and strengthening them to the point where our tired, old institutions will have no choice but to retreat into the dustbin of history.

But, just to be clear, we are declaring our independence from existing institutions. We have too much to lose if we remain prisoners of the outdated institutions that surround us.

The Disruption Debate – What’s Missing?

I admit that I’m mystified by Jill Lepore’s article in the New Yorker attacking Clayton Christensen and his theory of disruptive innovation. Not only does it have a meanness that isn’t warranted, but it leaves the reader with an unanswered question: if Clay's theories are not helpful (and I still believe they are), how do we explain the cascading disruptions that are playing out in markets and industries around the world?

Some of the commentators may be right: perhaps this article is better read as the most recent manifestation of the cultural conflict between the humanities-driven East and the technology-driven West.  The irony here is that the conflict is specifically between two professors at Harvard University – one based on the east coast of the Charles River and the other based on the west coast of the Charles River.

Clay Christensen has offered a rebuttal of sorts in an interview here. He does a good job of responding to some of the specific factual issues in his case studies highlighted by Jill Lepore and emphasizes that he continues to evolve his theory of disruptive innovation based on new research. But perhaps his best question is why she didn’t simply call him up or walk down the street to visit him before writing the attack to see if he might be able to clarify his position and his fact base.

I want to step back and use this controversy to underscore some key points that have been largely ignored in the recent discussion.

The systemic rise of disruption

First, while Jill Lepore might have issues with Clay’s specific theory and some of his case studies, she seems unwilling to acknowledge one basic fact of life: disruption is occurring with increasing frequency in the business world. Whether it is good or bad, it is happening and becoming increasingly widespread.

For the purpose of this posting, let me define disruption simply as the sudden demise of leaders or incumbents in particular markets or arenas. This demise is typically brought about by one or more players adopting a different approach to a market or arena that represents a significant challenge to the established position of existing participants. Disruptions turn the assets of incumbents into potentially life-threatening liabilities.

We all know the iconic cases of disruption casualties, including such large and well-known leaders as Kodak, Borders, Digital Equipment Corporation. But those are just the tip of the iceberg. There’s mounting evidence that disruption is spreading.

One of the issues with a case study approach is that it obscures the more fundamental and systemic trends and patterns that are playing out around us. When we pull back from individual stories and scan the world around us, it becomes clear that something very profound is happening – and it's largely escaped notice.

One of the metrics in our Shift Index looks at what economists call topple rate – the rate at which leaders fall out of their leadership position. In this case, we focused on the rate at which public US companies in the top quartile of return on assets performance fall out of this leadership position. Between 1965 and 2012, the topple rate increased by 40%.

OK, but the skeptic might reply that this is only about financial performance. Another more significant measure of fall from leadership position is provided by my old colleague and mentor, Dick Foster, who looked at the average lifespan of companies on the S&P 500.  In 1937, at the height of the Great Depression and certainly a time of great turmoil, a company on the S&P 500 had an average lifespan of 75 years.  By 2011, that lifespan had dropped to 18 years – a decline in lifespan of almost 75%.  At the same time that humans are significantly increasing their lifespan, large companies have been heading rapidly in the opposite direction.

So, the bottom line is that leaders are toppling with much greater frequency. Sure, some of that toppling may be the result of incompetence or mistakes made by senior management but, to explain away these trends, one would have to believe that management is becoming significantly more incompetent over time.

It's also clear that some of the toppling is the result of the natural process of market competition. As Joseph Schumpeter famously observed, markets are a powerful engine for "creative destruction" – they invite competitors with a better idea or a better approach to come in and challenge incumbents. It happens all the time. But the key question on the table from this more systemic view of disruption is: why is it increasing so dramatically over a long period of decades?

This is where I found Jill Lepore’s essay most wanting.  It’s easy to criticize an existing theory, but even assuming that this one doesn’t work (which I don’t), what’s the alternative? What’s going on? Jill Lepore certainly doesn’t venture an alternative theory and she clearly believes that the phenomenon of disruption is far too over-hyped. Without rushing to the defense of the disruption evangelists, I would suggest that she should have done more to at least acknowledge there is a disturbing trend here that needs to be explained. One gets the distinct impression that she believes that disruption is not all that significant

Forces at work in the Big Shift

So, what’s going on here? Based on the work that we’ve done on the Big Shift, let me suggest that the trend towards increasing disruption is a result of the convergence of two powerful forces that are playing out on a global scale.  First, we have the advent of digital technology as a disruptive force.

Yes, we've had major technology disruptions in the past – think of the steam engine, electricity and the telephone. But there’s one key difference that helps to explain a sustained and increasing pattern of disruption today.

In all those prior technology disruptions, we saw a dramatic burst of innovation in the core technology followed by a rapid stabilization with only modest incremental improvements in price/performance afterwards. Then one saw a burst of innovation at the infrastructure level in terms of thinking about how to most effectively deliver that technology to the broader economy and society – think for example of the insight that electricity could be more effectively generated in centralized facilities rather than on the premise of the user.  But once again, that was followed by rapid stabilization in terms of infrastructure deployment, giving firms an opportunity to think through how to most effectively harness this technology in their business.

Digital technology is different – in fact, it’s unprecedented in human history.  It’s the first technology that has demonstrated sustained exponential improvement in price/performance over an extended period of time and continuing into the foreseeable future (based on interviews with scientists and technologists pushing the boundaries of this technology).  

So, there’s no stabilization in the core technology components of computing, storage and bandwidth. As a result, there’s no stabilization in infrastructure – cloud computing is simply the most recent manifestation of this infrastructure and it certainly won't be the last.  And therefore there’s no stabilization in terms of how companies can use this technology to create and capture value.

But there’s more. This exponentially improving digital technology is spilling over into adjacent technologies, catalyzing similar waves of disruption in diverse arenas like 3D printing of physical objects, biosynthesis of living tissue, robotics and automobiles, just to name a few. The advent of exponentially improving technologies in an expanding array of markets and industries only increases the potential for disruption. We’ve explored this expansion of exponential technologies in a working paper here.

And this is just one of the forces at work.  There’s a second force at work as well – a long-term shift in public policy on a global basis towards freer movement of people, goods, money and ideas across geographic and industry boundaries.  Certainly this has unfolded at a different pace in different geographies and industries, but if one steps back and looks at the period from World War II to today, the trend is clear and significant.

Now, I will grant that this second force is a wild card.  There’s nothing to guarantee that this force will continue to play out in the direction of further economic liberalization.  In fact, there’s a growing risk that there will be a significant public policy backlash.  Incumbent players, whether they are taxi cab drivers in New York or global multinational companies facing disruptive attackers, will mobilize in an effort to use regulation and taxation to erect barriers and protect their positions from attack. While I acknowledge this risk, I'm an optimist and I believe that ultimately such protectionist efforts will be undermined by increasingly powerful consumers and by global technology infrastructures that will make public policy barriers difficult to enforce.

But, for the moment, these two forces – exponentially improving technology and economic liberalization – are combining to create environments that are increasingly vulnerable to disruption. In economic terms, they are doing two things.  First, they are systematically and substantially reducing barriers to entry and barriers to movement on a global scale. Second, exponentially improving technology is offering untapped capabilities that can be a catalyst to fundamentally re-think business models and institutional arrangements.

Bottom line, they are catalyzing more opportunity for players to adopt new approaches that can be highly disruptive on three levels:

• The approaches render obsolete a significant part of the existing assets/installed base of incumbents
• The approaches cannot be effectively addressed without significantly cannibalizing existing revenue/profit streams of incumbents
• The approaches are driven by a fundamentally different set of assumptions regarding the drivers of value creation/capture relative to the assumptions that have driven the success of the current incumbents – they challenge the mindsets/mental models of the incumbents

And, because they are reducing barriers to entry and movement, they are increasing both the motivation and ability of players to pursue these disruptive approaches.

So, at a macro level, I'd suggest that these forces help to explain why we are experiencing more frequent and widespread disruptions on a global scale. (And, by the way, while my focus here has been on companies, I believe that all institutions are becoming increasingly vulnerable to disruption as a result of these forces).

Some open questions

This perspective of course leaves a lot of open questions.  For example, can we predict where and when specific disruptions will play out? I for one don't believe that such predictions are possible but I suspect that we can better understand specific patterns of disruption that are likely to play out and, as a result, better anticipate which markets or industries might be most vulnerable to certain patterns of disruption. In fact, the Center for the Edge is about to embark on a research initiative in this area and I invite any of you who find this interesting to connect and contribute.

Another question is what incumbent players can do to more effectively respond to these disruptive approaches (short of resorting to regulation and other public policy measures). This is a topic for a much longer post. While I certainly don’t pretend to have all the answers to this, I believe that one key requirement for incumbent players is to find ways to expand the horizons of their leadership team beyond the next quarter or next year and to challenge on a sustained basis the key assumptions, often unstated, that they bring to the table regarding what is required for business success. And, perhaps most basic of all, they need to acknowledge the growing force of disruption and resist the temptation to dismiss or deny that it exists.

The Cumulative Power of Narrative

Narratives have great power, but their power increases dramatically when building on other narratives.

What does that mean in practice? It means that we need to be thoughtful and deliberately make choices about where we choose to pursue our narratives. Context and location are critical to enhancing the power of narrative.

I’ve made a distinction between stories and narratives here and here. Briefly, I’ve suggested that stories are self-contained (they have a beginning, middle and resolution) and they're about the story teller or some other people, they're not about the listener.  In contrast, narratives are open-ended, they are yet to be resolved and their resolution depends upon the choices and actions of the listener.  As a result, they're a powerful call to action, emphasizing the agency that we all have to make a difference.

I’ve also suggested that narratives exist at three distinct levels – personal, institutional and social. Most recently, I’ve been exploring the power of personal narrative here and here.

Start with your personal narrative

Now, let's pull back and explore how these three levels of narratives can be connected to achieve even more impact. We need to start by reflecting on and refining our own narrative.  Few of us have taken the trouble to articulate our personal narrative, much less reflect on it.

Yet, if we look back on the major choices and actions in our lives, there is an implicit narrative, even if we weren'tt aware of it at the time. We owe it to ourselves to draw out that narrative and reflect on its usefulness in helping us to have the kind of impact we want in the world. 

Many of our narratives are limiting or even self-destructive. We have an opportunity to achieve much more of our potential if we evolve more effective narratives that tap into what we are really trying to achieve and that more productively engage others in helping us to achieve greater impact. It doesn’t matter where we are; if our narrative is limiting, we won’t be able to take full advantage of the resources that our environment provides.

But, if we are pursuing a more effective narrative, then location and context can make a big difference. Remember, narratives are ultimately a call to action for the people around us.  If the people around us are pursuing very different, and perhaps even contradictory narratives, we’ll be much less effective than if we can connect with people who are pursuing complementary narratives.  Yes, I know, digital networks can help to connect us, wherever we’re located, but I continue to believe that face to face relationships in physical space are ultimately the most powerful form of connections.

So, what should we do? Well, once we’ve reflected on our existing narrative and determined what personal narrative would have the greatest ability to achieve more of our potential, perhaps we should start reflecting on relevant institutional and social narratives.  I mean, start taking a hard look at the narratives of the institutions and societies where you are currently spending your time.  Are they consistent with the personal narrative you're seeking to pursue? Do they offer the potential to amplify the impact of your personal narrative? Or, do they undermine and subvert the personal narrative you're pursuing?

Explore relevant social narratives

The best place to start is with relevant social narratives. What city or region do you live in?  What's the narrative of that city or region? How does it map to your personal narrative? If it’s not consistent with your narrative, perhaps you might consider moving to a city or region that more closely maps to your narrative.  Then you’ll be more likely to find and connect with people who can support and amplify your personal narrative.  If the narrative of the city or region you live in is hostile to, or incompatible with, your personal narrative, you’ll find yourself constantly swimming upstream and drained by the effort, rather than energized.

And, by the way, if you don’t live in a city, perhaps you should consider moving to a city with a compatible narrative.  As I’ve indicated elsewhere, cities can be a powerful accelerator of learning, especially if the city has a narrative that's consistent with your personal narrative. Unless your personal narrative requires you to live in a rural area, you’re much more likely to be successful in pursuing your personal narrative if you live in a city.

Take a hard look at relevant institutional narratives

Once you’ve resolved that, the next question is what institution are you most closely affiliated with?  If you’re working as part of a larger group, does the company or group you work with have an institutional narrative that supports and amplifies your narrative?  If not, you’re likely to encounter the same issues I mentioned earlier with urban or regional narratives. You’ll be far more successful in pursuing your personal narrative if you're located in a city/region and organization that supports your personal narrative. 

I know we don’t always have the luxury of being able to make choices on these two fronts, but I’ve become convinced that we'd be well advised to make sacrifices when possible to get better alignment between our personal narratives and the urban/regional and institutional narratives around us. At a minimum, we should explore the potential to join together with others in the relevant institutions to evolve the insititutional narrative in a direction that's more compatible with our personal narrative.

My journey to Silicon Valley

How does this work in practice? Let me share a bit of my personal journey. I’ve discussed the evolution of my personal narrative here and here. As I’ve indicated, my personal narrative has evolved to something like: “let’s overcome our fear and feel the excitement that comes from exploring new frontiers on the edge together so that we can provide others with platforms to achieve more of their potential.” 

I grew up outside the U.S., living in a different country virtually every year, so I had no strong roots anywhere.  I went to college in the northeastern part of the US and England, two areas that are not particularly known as edgy.  But, during a summer in college, I had the good fortune to spend a summer in the San Francisco Bay area. I fell in love with the area immediately.  I knew this was the area where I was meant to live.

It took me about 15 years to finally make the move to this area but, once I did, there was no looking back.  Even though I had not yet started the process of articulating and evolving my narrative, I instinctively knew that this was an area full of edge frontiers to be explored. I was deeply moved by how friendly people were out here and how willing they were to connect and support each other in exploring frontiers together.

I moved to the San Francisco Bay area with a couple of friends to do a start-up in the computer industry.  At the time, I knew nothing about computers but I learned quickly by diving into the deep end of the pool.  It was an intense and deep immersion into an exciting frontier. The more I learned, the more I became convinced that this technology was an extraordinary platform to help all of us achieve more of our potential.

It was my first exposure to Silicon Valley, a region that has grown and evolved over decades, driven by a compelling narrative: “for the first time, we are in possession of a set of exponential technologies that have the potential to change the world but it won’t happen on its own.  Will you join us so that we can explore this digital frontier and change the world together?”   It has drawn people from all over the world who share a commitment to changing the world through technology innovation. It drew me and has held me captive for almost 35 years. 

I couldn’t imagine a more perfect alignment with my evolving personal narrative.  Over the years, I’ve met a dazzling array of people who, in one form or another, have joined me in exploring some very exciting frontiers on the edge of strategy and technology.

My journey through institutions

Over this exciting time in Silicon Valley, I've participated in many institutions, including start-ups, senior executive positions in tech companies and leading consulting firms.  Although it wasn’t explicit at the time, I've moved from one institution to another when I felt there would be an opportunity to have more impact on the edge frontiers that I was exploring. In each case, an institution with a complementary narrative provided me with far more leverage than I ever could have achieved on my own.  When our narratives started to diverge, I knew it was time to move on.

For an extended period of time, I was on my own, pursuing strategy consulting and business research as a free agent.  It was a wonderful and very rewarding time, but I missed the leverage that I achieved when I was able to participate in an institution that had a complementary narrative. 

When I was approached by Deloitte eight years ago to set up an independent research center that came to be known as the Center for the Edge, I saw an opportunity to build an institution with a narrative that would reinforce and leverage my personal narrative.  I’ve been able to gather a team of extraordinary people who have deeply bought in to our institutional narrative and who work together every day to achieve the opportunity that we see by engaging others in our journey.

One could say that I’ve been very lucky – serendipity has certainly played an important role in my life. But, on reflection, I would say that ny effort to make my own narrative explicit and then to evolve it in a more promising direction also played a significant role.  And, even more importantly, I’ve sought and found alignment between my personal narrative and relevant institutional and social narratives.

When these three levels of narratives are aligned, small moves smartly made can indeed set very big things in motion.  On the other hand, when these three levels of narratives are not aligned, even heroic efforts may only achieve marginal impact.

Bottom line

Don’t just focus on your personal narrative. Be aggressive in assessing the narratives of the institutions and cities/regions where you're most active. 

Start by asking the questions that I posed in a previous posting regarding your personal narrative:

• Given the choices I've made and the actions I've taken throughout my life, what's the personal narrative that has led me down this path?
• Is this personal narrative one that can help me to achieve the things that I really want to achieve or is it inhibiting me in some significant ways?
• How could others help me to achieve even more impact and what's in it for them?
• What specific choices can I make and what actions can I take in the next day, week and month that will start to evolve my narrative in ways that will help me to achieve more of my true potential?

Once you’ve addressed these questions, then ask a similar set of questions for relevant institutions and and cities/regions where you're most active:

• What narratives emerge from the choices and actions of these entities over their relevant history?
• Are these narratives consistent with the personal narrative I would like to evolve for myself?
• If they are not consistent with the personal narrative I'm seeking pursue, what can I do to shift towards institutions and cities/regions that more closely align with my personal narrative?

Personal Narratives (The Sequel) – Unpacking and Tapping Into Potential

In my last posting, I shared the evolution of my personal narrative to illustrate how personal narratives can both confine and expand our horizons.

A number of you reached out to me and questioned whether I was really talking about a narrative or simply a belief about how others could support me in achieving impact.  Once again, as in my early discussion of corporate narratives, I’m guilty of abbreviation in a way that can mislead.

Let me unpack my early personal narrative statement into something that maps more clearly to a narrative structure while still leaving it open-ended and ultimately calling the listener to action (for the distinction between a story and narrative, see my early post here).

As you may recall, I framed my early personal narrative as follows:  “I’m here to help you with my mind.” Now, as presented, it doesn’t sound much like a narrative.  But let’s dive into this in more detail and flesh out the narrative lurking underneath that statement.

The deeper narrative

It all began in my early childhood when my first memories were of my mother’s tirades of anger. She said many things in anger, but the ones that stood out most in my memory were: “You’re such a burden – I wish you had never been born” and “You have no consideration of me – all you care about is yourself.”

As you might imagine, those words were deeply painful. My only escape was to retreat into my room and try to block out her yelling by immersing myself in a book that would take me to a distant place, leaving my emotions behind and seeking refuge in the world of the mind and imagination.

My father was often away. Even when he was there, he was a mild-mannered man and would go into his study, avoiding my mother’s wrath. The message to me was clear: I was abandoned by both of my parents.

After each tirade, I would resolve to be better. I tried as hard as I could to be a good boy and to be more attentive to my mother’s needs.  But nothing seemed to work. Her rage would be triggered by small, unexpected things, things that I couldn't anticipate or control. When I first heard the term “walking on eggshells”, I knew immediately what it meant.

The only thing that seemed to win praise from my mother was my academic accomplishment. Both my mother and father were the first in their family to go to college (not to mention graduate school) and they both respected academic achievement.

So, as I grew older, I channeled a lot of effort into accumulating good grades and degrees. I began to write, both because that also won praise from my parents and because it was a way for me to express myself without having to engage in face to face interactions with people (because, God knows, I would possibly trigger rage from others).

When I was in fourth grade, I took an aptitude test and the results came back saying that I should either be a priest or a social worker.  At the time, I dismissed these results, since I had no particular religious inclination or desire to work with the emotionally troubled or the poor. But, as I look back, I now realize that the aptitude test might have been far more insightful than I thought at the time.

I ended up spending most of my career as a management consultant.  While one might not immediately associate management consultants with priests or social workers, they do share one thing in common.  They’re all driven by a desire to help people.  They’re all focused on the needs of others, rather than one’s own needs. As a management consultant, you’re taught from the first day that the client’s needs come first, that everything else is secondary. Your goal is to understand their needs and then do whatever you can to address their needs.

The key lesson that I took from my childhood was that my needs did not matter.  It was all about seeing and serving the needs of others. If I could only do that, I might win the respect and love of those around me. 

So, what’s your role in my life? How can you help me to achieve more of my potential? Tell me what you need and I’ll do anything I can to satisfy those needs, especially if they involve intelligence and analytic skills, because that’s something that I can provide. Will you do that? My ability to grow and to develop as a person hinges on that.

Now, that’s a narrative.  It has a dramatic arc involving encounters with challenges and obstacles and finding a way forward, but the outcome is open-ended. It’s not resolved and the resolution hinges on the choices and actions that you as the listener can take. What will you do? Will you help to shape the outcome?

The potential of personal narratives

As I indicated in my last posting, personal narratives can be very limiting and confining. They can shape powerful prisons offering little opportunity for escape. In a world of mounting performance pressure, I fear that most of us are falling into personal narratives that are dysfunctional and don’t serve us well.

But, by making these personal narratives explicit, reflecting on them and then making choices to craft a new narrative, we can evolve personal narratives that amplify our potential for impact. In my previous post, I shared some of my own experience in evolving my personal narrative, but the key first step was to identify my existing narrative.

If we get them right, what can personal narratives do? Effective personal narratives can help us to focus, increase leverage and accelerate learning.

Focus. In a world of mounting performance pressure, we all have a natural tendency to shrink our time horizons and fall into a reactive mode – scrambling to respond to the latest development and spreading ourselves way too thinly across too many things. Personal narratives are forward looking – they draw us out of the past and the present and focus us on the opportunities ahead. They typically define a domain where we aspire to have greater impact over time and give us an ability to prioritize all those short-term calls for our attention. By asking “what am I here to do?” personal narratives also foster a sense of agency. They focus us not just on beliefs, but actions that we must take.

Leverage. In a world of mounting performance pressure, if all we do is rely on ourselves, we are likely to feel increasing stress and diminishing impact. One of the keys to success is finding ways to engage and motivate others to help us achieve even more impact.  Personal narratives help us to connect more effectively with others by being clear both about what we are trying to accomplish and where and how others can help us. 

Accelerate. In a world of mounting performance pressure, fear tends to prevail. We jealously protect what we already know and we’re often unwilling to take the risks required to learn faster.  By bringing us together with others around inspiring opportunities for impact, we create fertile conditions for much more rapid learning and performance improvement. We are more likely to take on challenging quests together.

Personal narratives can also play a significant role in building trust with others, because they prompt us to articulate what we are still trying to accomplish and where we need help – in other words, they express our vulnerability. Trust based relationships are central to accelerating learning.  All of this is key to accelerating progress.  As we move from a linear world to an exponential world, acceleration is ultimately a key requirement for success. We certainly can’t afford to stand still and even linear progress is insufficient.

Personal narratives and passion

Now, for those of you who have been following my other writing, you might have noticed an interesting parallel.  The three elements of focus, leverage and accelerate map very conveniently to the three attributes of passion of the explorer – long-term commitment to a domain, connecting disposition and questing disposition.  Personal narratives can become a powerful catalyst to tapping into and amplifying the passion that resides within all of us. If you’re interested in the connection between narrative and passion, I’ve written more here.

Personal narratives and personal brands

I can’t resist. Let me also take a minute to differentiate personal narrative from one of the business buzzwords of the day – personal brand (which I’ve written about here).  Personal brand is all about communicating your accomplishments and strengths, packaging them in a powerful way so that we can influence others. Personal narrative, in sharp contrast, shifts the focus from what you have done to what you want to do, but have not yet done. It also highlights your need for help from others. In many respects, it’s the opposite of the notion of a personal brand, but ultimately far more powerful and satisfying.

Bottom line

Personal narratives shape our lives in powerful, yet often unseen, ways. We rarely take the effort to make these narratives explicit, much less reflect on them. We owe it to ourselves (and to others) to do this. Try answering the four questions that I offered at the end of my last post. You might be surprised by what you discover.

Personal Narratives: Insight and Impact

We all have a personal narrative, even though few of us have made the effort to articulate it.  That’s a shame because our personal narrative can be a source of deep insight as well as a great way to amplify impact. Done right, they can be a powerful weapon in helping us to escape from the dark side of technology.

I’ve written a lot about narratives, for example, here and here.  Narratives are different from stories in that they’re open-ended (they don’t yet have a resolution) and they’re ultimately about the people you’re talking to, not about you, the story teller, or some other people. Narratives are powerful because they are ultimately a call to action – they help people to see how they can have greater impact.

There are social narratives and institutional narratives, but we each have a personal narrative as well. At the end of the day, that’s the narrative that really counts.  It defines how we connect with the world and where and how we can have impact.

The elements of a personal narrative

So, what’s a personal narrative? Like all narratives, it ultimately answers three questions:

• Why am I here?
• What can I accomplish?
• What can you do to help me accomplish that?

The key is that final question – it defines how you will connect with people and represents a call to action for them.

Like I said, few of us have taken the trouble to articulate our personal narrative, even though we all have one. It’s usually an implicit narrative that can be made explicit by reflecting on the choices we have made and the actions we have taken throughout our lives. Even though our lives are usually very complex and often involve what appear to be very diverse activities and relationships, there's usually a thread running through all of that, a thread that, when made visible, can be very revealing.

Making our narrative explicit can yield a lot of insight about who we have been and gives us a chance to reflect on whether it is who we really want to be.

My early personal narrative

Take my own personal narrative as an example.  I grew up in a dysfunctional family environment and it shaped a powerful narrative, one that helped me to survive that childhood but one that became more and more limiting over time.

My early narrative could be summarized as “I’m here to help you with my mind.”

This narrative made me a servant of others.  The idea that others could help me was completely foreign to me – I was isolated in an environment where I was repeatedly told what a burden I was. No, my role was to help others, to be very attentive to what the needs of others were and to respond quickly and effectively in addressing those needs.  My needs were irrelevant.

Also, my childhood experiences had taught me that emotions were very dangerous and destructive. I was exposed on a daily basis to the deep anger of my mother. My only escape was into the refuge of books where I could engage in the world of the mind, and leave all those troubling emotions behind me.

So, it was natural that, in seeking how to help others, I would focus on harnessing my mind and intellect, rather than trying to engage with people on an emotional level.  It led me to focus on cultivating my mind – I excelled in school (even though I rarely went to class) and I stayed in school for a very long time (ultimately collecting my final degrees at age 28).

I also channeled a lot of my helpfulness to others in the form of writing to express ideas and insights that could be used by others. Writing was a particularly appealing way to help because it allowed me to avoid direct contact with people and kept me safely isolated behind my desk.

In my personal relationships, I was the caregiver (the father figure), taking care of every need of my partner and rarely, if ever, expressing my own needs, much less asking for help.  I would use my intellect to earn a good living so that I could be an even better caregiver.

I wasn't consciously aware of the narrative that was shaping my life, but it had a profound effect on me. All my major choices and actions in my early life could be explained in terms of this narrative.

My evolving personal narrative

The process of making this narrative explicit had a powerful impact.  It made me aware of how limiting and confining this narrative had been on my life.  It also made me aware that there was another part of me that was struggling to express itself, a part that was much richer and ultimately far more rewarding.

So I began to craft a new narrative, one that I'm continuing to evolve, but one that is far more satisfying. It goes something like this: “let’s overcome our fear and feel the excitement that comes from exploring new frontiers on the edge together so that we can provide others with platforms to achieve more of their potential.”

It starts with acknowledging fear, an emotion that had a profound impact on me as a child and one that still haunts me in so many ways.  But then it quickly shifts to the opportunity for excitement, something that I’ve increasingly felt as I’ve found ways to let go of my fear, especially by coming together with others who share my quests on the edge.

Now I’m not alone, but I’m inviting others to join me and share the excitement of exploration. By coming together we can more effectively overcome our fears and learn faster than we ever could on our own. Emotions, both negative and positive, are now front and center in my narrative.

There’s still a component of helping others, but now it’s a little more nuanced. Rather than simply helping others who are passive, it’s about helping others to take more initiative to grow and achieve more of their potential. Once again, together we can achieve far more than we ever could on our own.

Notice that, while the narrative is deeply personal, it's very much focused on communicating to others where and how they can contribute to my quest – and articulating what's in it for them. In fact, it now becomes our quest – we're coming together to accomplish something awesome.

Escaping the prison of limiting personal narratives

My early personal narrative was clearly shaped by my unique circumstances, but I’ve come to believe that this kind of limiting, perhaps even dysfunctional, personal narrative isn't unusual.

In fact, I believe that most of us, in a world of mounting performance pressure, have evolved personal narratives that don't serve us well.  Sure, they represent an understandable reaction to the pressures around us, but they dramatically narrow our ability to achieve our full potential. 

Only by making them explicit and reflecting on them will we be able to assess whether they serve our true needs and potentially evolve much higher impact narratives.

Bottom line

Here are four questions to ask yourself:

• Given the choices I've made and the actions I've taken throughout my life, what's the personal narrative that has led me down this path?
• Is this personal narrative one that can help me to achieve the things that I really want to achieve or is it inhibiting me in some significant ways?
• How could others help me to achieve even more impact and what's in it for them?
• What specific choices can I make and what actions can I take in the next day, week and month that will start to evolve my narrative in ways that will help me to achieve more of my true potential?

The journey shaped by these questions could be a very uncomfortable one, but it's a journey that could help us to become much more of who we really were meant to be.