Category Archives: Fourth Industrial Revolution

Three Ways to Be More Agile

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In their definitive book on the subject, Bill Joiner & Stephen Josephs define leadership agility as, “The ability to take wise and effective action amid complex, rapidly changing conditions.”[1]“Complex, rapidly changing conditions” certainly characterizes the current era that we are all experiencing, an era that has been given the name The Fourth Industrial Revolution – “a technological revolution blurring the lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres (Klaus Schwab).”

The role that technology is having on our lives goes way beyond tools that increase our productivity and convenience. It is also profoundly changing the way we live, work and relate to each other. Think about this: it took 75 years for the telephone to get 100 million users; it was only two years for Instagram to reach 100 million users; and the Pokémon Go app only needed two months to reach 100 million! Consider the pace, pervasiveness and meaning of the societal changes represented in this one example.

When I work with leaders they often express grudging acceptance of complex, rapidly changing conditions as being the new normal. But they are still stressed and frustrated by their teams’ or their own personal inability to be agile enough to feel like they are doing more than responding to constant chaos.

How can you be more agile? First and foremost, agility requires a curious mindset that is always looking to learn. In the Fourth Industrial Revolution, subject matter expertise will be less valuable than a growth mindset that actively desires to see things differently. In the book Agility Shift[2] author Pamela Myer offers three good suggestions to put this kind of mindset into practice:

Hold Mental Models Lightly. Question your assumptions and proactively try on different perspectives to open your mind to new ideas and possibilities for action. Don’t give into an immediate impulse to disagree. Rather, ask yourself what might be good or worthwhile about something.

Adopt an Attitude of Inquiry. ASK QUESTIONS!! Studies of effective teams show that they spend equal amounts of time asking each other questions as they do advocating for particular positions or solutions. Also, be intentional about asking questions whose answers may challenge your own assumptions and biases. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella urges “working to shift from fiefdoms of know-it-alls to a more open, collaborative culture of learn-it-alls”

Cultivate confidence. Be curious and willing to learn by seeking out experiences that will stretch you or take you out of your comfort zone. The result may be that you broaden the scope of skills you have to confidently apply to a wider range of situations and problems.

One of the jobs of a leader is to enable wise and effective action. When the conditions are ambiguous (what your choices are is unclear), complex (hard to analyze) and constantly changing, agility will be an essential quality to succeed in this current age.

[1] Joiner, B., & Josephs, S. (2007). Leadership agility: Five levels of mastery for anticipating and initiating change. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

[2] Meyer, P. (2015). The Agility shift: Creating agile and effective leaders, teams, and organizations. Brookline, MA: Bibliomotion.

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Going Outside Your Frame of Reference

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I like to begin leadership agility classes with the following exercise. I ask small groups to work together to identify the different items that have experienced the changes in the table below. About half of the time, the groups make an interesting but flawed assumption – they believe that the data refers only to their industry.

What Is It? 2000 2010 2017
100 million 2 billion 4.5 billion
$10 6 cents 3 cents
2.7 18 42
17 million 188 million 1.24 billion
12 million/month 247 million/month 781 million/month

A frame of reference is “the overall context in which a problem or situation is placed, viewed, or interpreted. A too-narrow frame may leave out critical factors, whereas a too-broad frame may include many irrelevant distractions.”[1] In the cases I described, the groups had a too-narrow frame of reference.

The ability to choose an appropriate frame of reference is a key leadership agility skill, especially as it relates to two specific competencies: context-setting agility and creative agility. Context setting agility involves determining the optimal scope of an initiative as well as seeing connections “outside the box” of one’s specific function, company or industry. Creative agility requires thinking outside of habitual assumptions.

The challenge that we all face when it comes to frame of reference is our immediate tendency to take what Daniel Kahneman (Thinking, Fast and Slow) calls an “inside view” where we solve problems and make decisions by searching for evidence within our specific circumstances and our own experiences. This kind of thinking will be extremely problematic in the Fourth Industrial Revolution where new ways of doing things are being merged from different industries and technologies at unprecedented speeds and dramatically changing the ways in which all work is being done. The ability to agilely shift contexts and think with creativity will significantly enhance leadership responsiveness in the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Unfortunately, as much as organizations strive to overcome “business as usual”, operate outside of “silos” and to encourage “out of the box” thinking, the inside view is a problematic bias as the pervasiveness of these phrases (and my exercise) will attest. It’s quite natural to solve problems and make decisions based on what we know. However, in doing so we are failing to account for what Donald Rumsfeld called the “unknown unknowns”.

So how does one take an outside view? In terms of researching a problem, one way to take an outside view is to look for data that contains information outside of your own thinking and: 1) don’t discount it; 2) consider how it might be relevant.

In terms of collaborating with others, outside view thinking means to move from “What?” to “What else?”. In other words, you must challenge your initial conclusions about “what” you think something is and then consider “what else” it could be. A good initial “what else” question is what would a person with a different frame of reference see? To move from an inside view or frame of reference to an outside view/frame of reference, one must be intentional about questioning initial assumptions and encourage the expression of multiple viewpoints. This ability to shift contexts agilely among multiple frames of reference without being attached to any single frame allows for a perspective outside of conventional “wisdom” and makes it easier to be more creatively agile.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution will require new approaches to new and complex problems. In order to combat the tendency of inside view thinking, we must hold our frames of reference loosely, while going outside our frames to question the sufficiency of our own knowledge and experiences.

Oh. The answers to the table? Here they are.

What Is It? 2000 2010 2017
Daily Google Searches 100 million 2 billion 4.5 billion
Hard Drive Storage $/GB $10 6 cents 3 cents
Weekly Hours Online 2.7 18 42
Websites 17 million 188 million 1.24 billion
Text Messages, U.S. 12 million/month 247 million/month 781 million/month

__________________________________________

[1] http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/frame-of-reference.html

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Keys to Success in The Fourth Industrial Revolution

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The Fourth Industrial Revolution will reinvent work and the workplace. Even as “machines” and devices do more and more, those tasks that are non-automated will require people to be more connected and work more collaboratively than ever.

The successful team will be made up of people who:

  • Learn, share and connect ideas.
  • Build good relationships with colleagues and stakeholders, inside and outside their organizations.
  • Are able to work productively and agilely across multiple boundaries whether they be functional, industry, governmental and/or national.
  • Fundamentally understand that the impact of technology on society is not just about consumers and producers but that it is also about driving progress and not just profits.

Given this, leadership in The Fourth Industrial Revolution will have to be evolve. Leaders will be required to:

  • Be co-creators rather than innovators.
  • Be empathetic collaborators rather than forceful commanders.
  • Be humane and emotionally intelligent.

The following article articulates some of the trials and successes that NASA has had in being challenged “to be more agile, think differently, buy smarter and develop more efficiently”:  https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/the-change-agents-bringing-tradition-bound-nasa-into-the-future/2018/08/24/626e6f02-a646-11e8-a656-943eefab5daf_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.7ebecabf3e56

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Get Ready for The Fourth Industrial Revolution

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The first post of an occasional series.

Imagine you’re heading home from work in your driverless car while scrolling through emails on the touchscreen dashboard. As you digest thoughts from your global team that has never met in person, you feel a pang of hunger and so you say, “Order takeout.” You audibly choose from a list of recent orders that appears on your dashboard from your favorite restaurant. Your voice is transmitted and recognized by the restaurant’s automated order system which includes GPS that determines how long it will be until you arrive at home. That system will set the timing for robots to prepare the food and for drones to deliver it within minutes of your arrival to your house. The garage door will open after doing a retinal scan as your car approaches it. That scan will also open the door to the house, send instructions to turn the TV on to your regular channel and direct the refrigerator to pour a draft of your favorite ale.

This imaginative story – where you didn’t interact with a single other person – is far-fetched only to the degree that it is probably not far-out enough. The Fourth Industrial Revolution is on the horizon and it will change our relationships to the world, life, work and each other in fundamental and far-reaching ways.

The First Industrial Revolution used water and steam to power automated machinery. The Second Industrial Revolution used electricity to power communication and mass production assembly lines. The Third Industrial Revolution used the internet and digital information technology to connect people and production in unprecedented ways. Now a Fourth Industrial Revolution [4IR] is emerging out of the Third with a boundaryless convergence of physical, biological, digital and social realms. The speed (exponential acceleration), scope (global magnitude) and systemic impact (production, management and governance) of the developments and innovations we will be subjected to during this revolution will be unlike anything we’ve ever experienced before.

My interests in the 4IR are in how it will impact people in the workplace – whatever “workplace” will come to mean – in terms of how they will lead, follow and collaborate to produce results within their organizations. The increased dependency on machines will mean less direct interaction with other people. Paradoxically, I believe that the quality of our relationships, communication and collaboration will need to increase. Whatever changes occur in terms of how we work together, our contacts with each other will need to be more productive, constructive and efficient so that the output from our less frequent interactions will be maximized. This will heighten the requirement for people skills in the workplace.

The 4IR will also bring a need to be proactive and purposeful about balancing economic concerns with social, human and cultural concerns. Through interdependent empathy and stewardship, organizations must seek to do well for all by doing good for all. The challenge we face in this regard is that technological capabilities are moving faster than our moral and ethical systems to govern them. The current debate over the ability to make guns with 3-D printers is a cogent case in point for our inability to coalesce around common values to govern this application of technology. We are about to be confronted by many more such clashes between innovation and collective stewardship.

The 4IR is bringing technology into every aspect of what it means to be human. There is virtually no way to predict what this will look like. But what it means for us as co-creators of this future is that we will need to be progressively more mindful, creative and intentional about the ways in which we lead, follow and collaborate with each other.

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