Jeremie Averous's Blog, page 76

How to Replace the Industrial Age Labor Loop?

The Industrial Age has been built by the labor loop: pay workers more so that they can consume more factory products. This has led to unprecedented improvement of living conditions and overall wealth. This also worked well in an era of scarcity.

Ford announcing doubling of wave to 5$ a day – typical of the Industrial Age labour loop

As we reach an era of abundance, where manufacturing can produce way more than we can or should consume, what will be the new model that will drive progress in the world? There is much talk about replacing it with a knowledge loop. An excellent post describes this transformation: ‘From the Job Loop to the Knowledge Loop (via Universal Basic Income)‘.

At the same time I find that the view of a knowledge loop supported by basic income where everybody would keenly participate to creating knowledge quite utopic. I am not sure everybody would indeed participate actively, and how the contributions of individuals could be valued.

Nevertheless, the crisis of the labor loop is upon us, as shown by the relative decrease of wages as part of wealth creation and we need to find an alternative model.

Why There Will be Less ‘Jobs’ in the Collaborative Age

Irrespective of whether the amount of work available will change (it might remain quite stable), the number of ‘jobs’ (meant as being an employee) will certainly decrease.

Self-employment is already dramatically on the rise in many countries for a while and it is I believe a trend that will remain.

Platforms that serve to link self-employed people and clients are also on the rise.

Self-employment is not always a choice: it is sometimes the only way to keep some activity and a lot of self-employed people work are forced to work part-time and at weird times too.

At the same time, self employment means more freedom and flexibility, and the possibility to have several concurring activities.

It is strange how the administrative organization of most developed countries are so tweaked to considering people as being employee of some organization. This creates all sorts of complications for the self-employed, or requires to create a company to become an employee of sorts.

The trend to self-employment is here to stay. Our institutions should change to cater for this situation and better protect those who work under this model.

How to Approach the Question of Job Availability in the Collaborative Age

Will there be more or less jobs in the Collaborative Age? This is a decisive political question at the core of many discussions and votes.

[image error] Robot waiters in action

One one hand, there is an impression that robots will take over jobs, in particular those that are do not require high qualifications.  For example, truck drivers represent up to 2.5% of the total workforce in the US and could be soon replaced by robots (to which other types of drivers like taxi etc need to be added, bringing possibly the total to 3.0 or 3.5%). This is a huge, huge number and the shift may happen soon. How will those people redeploy their talent?

Others like Tim O’Reilly in this video titled ‘why we’ll never run out of jobs’ take the stand that the Collaborative Age will provide new opportunities and that work will not be a problem: according to him we’ll never run out of jobs, because:

we will never run out of problems
there will always be the need for new, attractive products
of innovation

That may be true once the transition has been performed.

One thing for sure, jobs in the Collaborative Age will be different than today’s. The skills and talents they will require will be different too.

The conversion of the current generation to the new situation may be painful and this may help explain the tidal waves of conservative fear of change that express themselves at each election.

How Business Control Shifts to Piloting Support in the Collaborative Age

One of the key transformations from the Industrial Age to the Collaborative Age is related to the function of Business Control.

In Industrial Age organizations, the control function acts as the police that checks that cost is minimized and employees and resources are used at their maximum productivity. It also covers all sorts of fraud prevention. It is by necessity a function kept independent of operational and line managers, reporting to senior management. Traditionally it is a role that concentrates a large part of the data gathering and analysis capability of the organization.

In Collaborative Age organization, a large part of the control function is evolving into a function that is embedded in the business and supports management decision-making on a day-to-day basis. This is the case for example in project management: project control is embedded in the project and its main role is to support the project manager pilot the project to its objectives. That role is not so much control as organizing the gathering of data, checking for its accuracy, analyzing it and devising appropriate forecasts as to the direction taken by the business.

However, the use of the confusing terminology of ‘project control’ is sometimes misinterpreted. It is not the traditional business control role and must actually be kept separate.

While there will still remain some part of actual business control in the older sense, most of the analytical resources of companies are now devoted to support decision-making, through Business Intelligence and other tools. This evolution will be reinforced into the Collaborative Age. And it is important we don’t keep the terminology ‘control’ to describe that function.

Why We Should Focus On Intentions Rather Than Goals

Leo Babauta at Zen Habits makes the case that we should focus on intentions rather than goals to achieve what we want.

“As you might know, I experimented with giving up goals after being very focused on goals for years. It was liberating, and it turns out, you don’t just do nothing if you don’t have a goal. You get up and focus on what you care about. Read more here. Instead, I’ve found it useful to focus less on the destination (goal) and instead focus on what your intention for each activity is. If you’re going to write something … instead of worrying about what the book will be like when you’re done, focus on why you want to write in the first place. If you are doing something out of love or to help others , for example, then you are freed from it needing to turn out a certain way (a goal) and instead can let it turn out however it turns out. I’ve found this way of working and living to be freeing and less prone to anxiety or procrastination.”

It is true that most of the literature is about setting goals and not necessarily about setting intentions. Personally I am still very much into goals. I am aware this approach requires a lot of personal discipline and is sometimes excessively straining. I certainly need to consider setting strong intentions instead!

How to Set the Conditions to Really Free Ourselves

Pema Chodron writes: “This moving away from comfort and security, this stepping out into what is unknown, uncharted and shaky – that’s called liberation.” Is that really true?

This idea that to be free we must move away from our comfort zone is quite strong and scary at the same time. It would mean that we can’t find freedom within the comfort of our lives.

The challenge is of course that those religious people who seek liberation tend to enclose themselves in a physical comfort zone made of habits and rituals. Is that possibly to be in a better situation to escape their mental comfort zone? This would seem to be a contradiction.

At the same time it is in times of unknown possibilities that we can find the best opportunities to reveal ourselves. That is often not possible in our comfort zone, unless some events happen that shake it.

It would seem to me that Pema Chodron’s words mean that we need to seek situations that are unknown and unpredictable to reach freedom. Let’s look for them – wherever they are, close or far from our comfort zone!

Why You Should Not Tell Your Friends Luck is the Reason for their Success

“Don’t try to tell your successful friends that they’re lucky. We saw that when Obama gave his speech in 2012 and Elizabeth Warren gave a similar speech, people didn’t like that. Those speeches were completely reasonable […], but people didn’t hear the reasonable part. The message they heard was that they didn’t deserve their success.” This recommendation is given by Robert Frank the author of ‘Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy‘, in an interview.

A large part of success is luck, that is not to be denied. However we still ascribe most of it to hard work and talent. Find the right way to investigate which was the share of luck by asking the right question.

He continues”That’s not the message of those speeches. If you want people to think about the fact that they’ve been lucky, don’t tell them that they’ve been lucky. Ask them if they can think of any examples of times when they might have been lucky along their path to the top.”

“I’ve tried this many, many times and can report to you that the successful people who would get angered and defensive if they were reminded that they were lucky, instead don’t get angry or defensive at all when they think about the question, “Can you think of examples of times when you were lucky?” Instead their eyes light up, they try to think of examples, they recount one to you, and that prompts them to remember another one, they tell you about that one too, and soon they’re talking about investments we ought to be making.”

How History Forgets That Searching for Truth Entails Risks

“Because biographies of famous scientists tend to edit out their mistakes, we underestimate the degree of risk they were willing to take. And because anything a famous scientist did that wasn’t a mistake has probably now become the conventional wisdom, those choices don’t seem risky either.” writes Paul Graham in an excellent short post, ‘the risk of discovery‘.

“Biographies of Newton, for example, understandably focus more on physics than alchemy or theology. The impression we get is that his unerring judgment led him straight to truths no one else had noticed. How to explain all the time he spent on alchemy and theology? Well, smart people are often kind of crazy.” (and it seems Newton’s dog helped burn his alchemy writings as well).

There are at least two interesting learning points from this reflection:

People who truly seek new truths at the border of knowledge will seem a bit crazy and will investigate potential avenues, some of which might not be fruitful at the end. And they will put in question mainstream knowledge, which can be dangerous for them.
History only highlights what is becoming new mainstream knowledge forgetting about the rest, and deleting it from collective memory. But that is reductive because we don’t know what will become mainstream in the future.

So it quite normal that we take risks if we strive to progress science and find new truths. Taking risk is part of it. Let’s not stop at it!

How Collaboration Is a Form of Competition

Collaboration is the keyword of the Collaborative Age. As a concept we often oppose Collaborative with Competition, with is more about us against the others. Does it need to be that way?

In a collaborative team, we do compete to give out our best. We compete against ourselves to contribute to the Cause.

Competition does not need to be egoistic in the sense of trying to gain at the expense of others. That’s an Industrial Age view of a world of limited supply that had to be split. The Collaborative Age is a world of plenty where we can create more.

We can thus compete with ourselves to create great performance, and leverage this performance in collaboration.

We know that competition is an approach that allows us to overcome our limits and create true achievements. Together with Collaboration, this creates results into the Collaborative Age.

Inspiration by a great post by Gapingvoid

How Drone Hives Are Becoming a Reality

Did you think that hives of drones coming upon us to overcome our defenses were things from a Hollywood movie? It is becoming real and it has the potentiel to change significantly the battlefield. In particular because hives of drones do not require each drone to be individually controlled – this creates a lot of resilience to the technology.

Small drone military usage is probably the new factor to be taken into account on the battlefield. There has been news of the Islamic State using small commercial drones carrying explosives (see for example ‘Pentagon confirms new threat from ISIS: exploding drones‘).

However one very impressive video is shown below, which is the usage of drone hives, still under development. Hives of small drones are dropped from fighter jets and then they behave like hives. The thing is that each drone is not individually piloted, the hive has a collective behavior with drones reacting to the others’ behavior. That’s really impressive, in particular the buzz of the drone hive homing in at the end of the video!