What if… EU had its own cryptocurrency?
Image by DreamStudio / stability.ai
It should be tied to the value of EUR. Let's call it cEUR.
Not for everyday transactions, in the ways we use EUR right now, but specifically for EU funding.
Blockchain makes currency non-fungible. That means you can trace when each cEUR changes ownership. In normal currency, a 20 EUR bill is interchangeable with any other 20 EUR bill. In blockchain, each cEUR is unique.
Let's imagine EU funding was done in cEUR. From central bank to member states to different agencies and institutions. And when that funding is used to pay salaries or purchase goods and services, it would be converted to our everyday normal EUR: cEUR would return to the central bank, and the matching amount of EUR would be paid to the recipient.
The increased traceability allowed by cEUR would make it more difficult for corrupt officials to pocket the money, or use it in unintended ways. It might also increase efficiency, as increase in transparency and traceability usually mean less (manual) control structures are needed.
Ps. I like pondering different "what if" scenarios from time to time. Maybe I will make it a habit to post these online. And hopefully people will tell me why I am wrong or what important aspect I didn't consider, so that I will end up smarter ;)
This particular one was inspired by the recent EU-Hungary events. I would be surprised if at least some of that 10b EUR funding didn't end up in the pocket of Orban and his cronies.
3 ways to give the gift of a better world
Image by DreamStudio / stability.ai
Over the years I've tried to find ways to do something good with the financial means I have as a middle class person living in Finland. Considering that we're in the season of gift-giving, I thought to share some of these ideas. Perhaps writing this will also have a positive impact on its own.
Start compensating your CO2 footprint
My go-to choice is GoClimate, as you can set up a monthly subscription, their organisation is very lean, and their CO2 footprint calculator is dead simple with less than 10 questions. Considering our family of three that lives in an apartment building in Finland, drives a PHEV car and travels little, I pay GoClimate 20 € a month.
Set up a monthly donation to Kiva.org
Kiva is an organisation that provides micro-loans to entrepreneurs, educators, farmers, refugees etc. around the world.
These loans have very good repayment rates. Meaning that the money you donate monthly ends up growing as time goes by. This leads to compounding positive impact over the long term, as you accumulate more and more capital with which to support different people and projects.
I am donating $10 a month and lent altogether $350, of which $127 have been repaid. That money has then been put back to use to provide more loans. I have supported family-run coffee farms in South America and initiatives that provide education to women in Africa, for example.
Support an artist or creator in Patreon
Patreon is a modern way to become a patron of arts. You don't need to be a renaissance banker to make a difference. When there are hundreds or thousands of people who contribute few bucks a month to an artist, it can enable them to focus full-time on pursuing their gift and create something meaningful. In niche music genres such as metal, a band that goes touring often ends up losing money, or barely covering their expenses, so every bit helps!
Pick someone who you think does important work that resonates with you and start supporting them. For example, take a loot at what the independent musician Ren is doing: how his songs have touched the soul of so many people and shone a light on mental illness.
As for creators, do you have a hobby? Are there people in YouTube or elsewhere doing something that helps you with it? Or makes you enjoy the hobby even more? How about supporting them with a recurring or one-off donation as a means of expressing thanks? I love board games and am ever thankful to Shut Up & Sit Down for bringing the hobby into life in a way that I never thought possible, which is why I happily donate $10 a month to help them keep the lights on and put food on the table.
Here are my ideas and suggestions for a different kind of Christmas gift. What are yours? What would you add to the list?
Playing Board Games in 2022
Overall, 2022 was comparable to 2021. I played almost the same number of games (196) as the previous year (193), but there were more unique titles (101 vs. 88). This made it more difficult to pick out clear winners, which is why I have also been procrastinating writing this post.
2022 was the year I got into Board Game Arena. A couple friends and I tried quite a few games there, playing asynchronously. The ones that saw most plays were Barrage, Beyond the Sun, Carnegie, Gaia Project and Great Western Trail.
When it comes to playing games live, I track both the number of plays and the time it takes to finish a game, excluding setup and teach.
When looking at the number of plays, these are the games that stand out most:
When including also the time spent playing a game, a few more titles get added to the list:
You may think this is my "top 10 of 2022," but that would be incorrect. While I enjoyed Nemesis and Merv for a while, I eventually sold both. As I said last year, the games that got the most plays weren't necessarily the most memorable gaming experiences of the year.
Looking back, the following games stand out as personal highlights:
Pax Renaissance (2nd edition). Ok, this also was my most played game of the year, and has actually become my most played game ever. Which is quite something, because it’s also a game I refuse to teach to anyone. It’s a beast to learn, but when you start playing, it’s surprisingly smooth and quick. And it’s one of the most fascinating games that I know.
Pax Renaissance
Carnegie. This one actually came out in 2022. The first time I played it, I didn’t particularly like it. But then I tried it again, discovered it has one of the best solo modes I’ve ever seen, and I’ve also played it a bunch online. Definitely my top pick when it comes to games that were published last year and I got to play (Yes, I’ve tried Ark Nova. It was ok.).
Carnegie
Grand Austria Hotel. I was hesitant to purchase this game, as on the surface it seemed a bit too dry for my tastes. I decided to try it out first from the library and discovered that the theme and mechanisms work together surprisingly well. It is also a great two-player game. It is tight, has a lot of variability, and isn't overlong.
Anachrony. I was late to jump on this bandwagon, although I had looked into the game multiple times before. What finally got me to get the Essential Edition (+ minis) was this fantastic how-to-play video, which made me understand the theme and how all the mechanisms fit together. While the game doesn't do anything particularly new, what it does, it does extremely well. I also like the way the game handles time travel. Plus, it plays surprisingly smoothly - at least, without expansions. After hearing so much praise, I also bought Fractures of Time and was disappointed. It added complexity and depth but also killed the flow of the base game. The expansion will not stay, but the base game will definitely get more plays in the future.
Anachrony
Age of Steam. A classic. I didn't particularly enjoy my first game, but when we tried a different map, I started to really like it. This game is very tight; a single mistake can cost you the victory. However, the rules are not overly complicated and there is lots of player interaction and table talk. It is a heavy and lengthy game, and the theme and aesthetics may not be for everyone, but it is a whole lot of fun!
Age of Steam
What were your most memorable gaming experiences of 2022? And what are you looking forward to in 2023?
At the time of writing this, I have finally gotten my copy of Stationfall, which I expected already in 2022, and Dune: Imperium is also waiting to get on the table with the new Immortality expansion. I have managed to play Horseless Carriage once and will definitely want more. Dungeon Degenerates has also seen quite a few solo plays in January.
Then there are the kickstarters that are supposed to arrive this year: Fractal, Beast, Shikoku 1889 (my first 18xx!), and a few others… We’ve also gotten Twilight Imperium 4 on the table with another game scheduled for April. This year is looking good!
When Bloodborne Met Stable Diffusion
Ingredient 1: I've been playing Bloodborne again for the past few weeks. Of all the From Software games (although I haven't played Demon’s Souls and Elden Ring yet) it's probably my favourite. I think it has the most interesting story, a great combat system and it just oozes style and design.
Ingredient 2: I learnt about DreamStudio and Lexica also a few weeks ago. DreamStudio provides access to an AI system that generates images from text. Lexica is a search engine for those images with their corresponding prompts.
Ingredient 3: I have Soul Arts on my shelf. A book that was kickstarted and is full of beautiful art, (re)imagining different aspects of various From Software games.
Now let's see what will happen when those three things are combined, with some visual styling added into the mix!
A gothic lakeside town, sunset, reflection, bloodborne by from software, studio ghibli, horror, highly detailed, volumetric lighting, octane render, 4k
The first experiment above turned out way better than expected. Having browsed Lexica before, I had some idea about what instructions to give in addition to the actual subject matter that I wanted to see.
Gothic haunted village with fanged beast stalking streets in moonlight, volumetric lighting, oil painting, exquisite detail, 4k, bloodborne by from software, studio ghibli, horror
I generated three images and this I felt captured best what I intended, though not quite there, so let’s adjust the prompt a little a bit…
Gothic city street where a fanged beast is stalking in moonlight, volumetric lighting, concept art, painterly, exquisite detail, 4k, bloodborne by from software, horror
I am still missing the kind of fanged beast I’d like to see. In addition, two out of three of the generated images contained rather distracting visual artifacts, such as a street lamp hanging on empty air. Oh well. Now let’s see if we can do something a bit more intimate…
A blacksmith forging a weapon in an outdoor smithy on a hill, autumn, smoke, fire, volumetric lighting, highly detailed, sinister atmosphere, muted colors, in style of Leonardo Da Vinci
Here you can see many of the visual artifacts and oddities that seem quite characteristic to these AI-generated images, and were present also in some of the other images I generated: the person in the middle has face and limbs missing, the buildings in the background are just weird and wrong, and something horrible is going on with the right arm of the character on the right.
From what I’ve seen browsing Lexica, landscapes and cityscapes seem to generate best results.
Deep within the sepulcher traipses a caustic creature filled with bitter anguish, concept art, horror, bloodborne by from software, octane render, 4k, highly detailed, volumetric lighting
The first part of the prompt in the above image is almost word-by-word from one of the image descriptions in Soul Arts. The result is nothing like the image in the book, but I find it absolutely mind-blowing that an AI can create such results from a few esoteric words of text. It’s not only that the images would depict what is written, but it is the overall style in them that I find truly astonishing. All the examples above, and even the images that “went wrong” by having too many mistakes in them, are stylistically very consistent. For example, there’s no mixing of anime style cartoon characters and painterly landscapes.
This makes me wonder what skilled artists could do, when a tool like this will allow them to quickly explore different concepts, pick up the stuff they find interesting and inspiring, and then proceed to create their own work.
If you want your mind to be truly blown, go and see what has been created by using ‘Studio Ghibli’ or ’Dark Tower’ as one of the prompts. Some of the results are absolutely gorgeus and, if created by human, could only be called imaginative.
Have a lovely weekend! ;-)
In Search of a Sustainable Pace
The Manifesto for Agile Software Development was published in 2001. It consists of four values and twelve principles. One of the principles states that “Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.” Not for the duration of a project, a sprint, a workweek or a client assignment, but as long as we are part of the working life. Yet how often do we consider the crunch time and long days at the end of a project, or a particularly busy time of the year, just part of the work? Or just the way things are around here?
What if we would treat that crunch time not as a feature but as a bug? As a sign that something is wrong in the way we plan and execute work. Because as long as it is treated as a feature of the work, there is no reason to do anything about it.
In the book Effortless, Greg McKeown retells the story of a race to the South Pole: In 1911 two teams attempted to be the first ones to reach it. One was lead by Captain Robert Falcon Scott from Great Britain, and the other by Roald Amundsen from Norway. Scott’s approach was to take advantage of the good weather days and drive his team to exhaustion, and move hardly at all on bad weather days, cursing the weather and complaining in his journal. Amundsen, on the other hand, insisted on progressing 15 miles towards the destination every single day, no matter what. Some days were more difficult than others, but even when the weather was good, his team stopped after having reached their daily goal. Even when it would have been easy to push further. Even when reaching the South Pole would have required just a few extra miles for the day.
Insisting on steady pace and plenty of rest also saw Amundsen’s team return home safely, “without particular effort,” whereas Scott’s team ended up so exhausted and demoralized that they all froze to death on the way back.
The Amundsen Expedition
When the training regime of Olympic-level athletes was studied, the researchers found that of all the training hours, 88.7 % were light intensity and only 4.8 % were high intensity. The takeaway is to exert only so much effort that you are capable of recovering from it for the next day. Being intentional about slow but steady progress ensures that the going will be smooth, and as demonstrated by Amundsen and his team, in the long run smooth is also fast.
The same principle is evident in lean production, where a common starting point is to control and reduce demand variability. This creates conditions for smooth, high-performing processes with little wasted effort, energy and resources.
Now the question is, what would you need to change in your own work to create conditions for making smooth and steady progress? McKeown suggests that we should define not just a lower bound for our daily work (e.g. the to-do list for the day), but also the upper bound (sticking to that list and making it easy enough that we can succeed in finishing it off). And when we have reached that upper bound, we should take cue from Amundsen and do something to rest, recover and reflect. Rinse and repeat. Day after day.
In my mind this approach also shifts the focus away from pursuing efficiency. In knowledge work there is always more work to be done than can be done. As said by Oliver Burkeman, author of Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, “efficiency leads to us feeling busier and busier about less important things.” Efficiency is a never-ending quest. Getting more done faster will not exhaust the amount of work there is to be done. New demands, tasks, projects and ideas will fill that void. Eventually the pursuit of efficiency becomes a trap that will leave you exhausted and demoralised. There is always more you could have done. The first step in escaping the trap is to recognise that it exists.
I for one aim to experiment setting upper and lower bounds during the next 2-3 months. This means looking at different demands, seeing how they could be managed to avoid crunch time (i.e. controlling demand variability to the extent that is possible), and planning my workdays so that they can be recovered from.
I wish you all a wonderful, sustainable and smooth autumn!
A Look Beyond Agile Methods and Frameworks
“As to methods there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is easy to get lost in the rabbit hole that is Agile. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of different frameworks and methodologies. What started as a declaration by software development consultants to deal with toxic work environments has since spread to other work domains and sprouted a movement towards organisational agility. It is not enough anymore for delivery teams or projects to be agile, but entire organisations are also pushing towards better adaptability and responsiveness to change. And there are frameworks for that too. With an army of consultants purveying them.
I did not learn about Agile the usual way, which is to be involved in software development. I did work in large-scale IT implementation projects for a few years, but those were anything but agile. My journey started by first studying innovation and entrepreneurship. I was trying to understand experimentation-driven development, where instead of making a plan from beginning to end, you focus on step-by-step learning and let the plan emerge as you make progress and gather empirical evidence.
As I was contrasting this seemingly more chaotic way to get things done to the project experience I had, I came upon a revelation: fundamentally, what we are talking about when we compare a planning-driven approach to a more agile and iterative, experimentation-driven one, is strategy for dealing with complexity and uncertainty.
In a traditional plan & control approach we assume that uncertainties can be resolved when making the plan. We know what we don’t know. Therefore we can make a plan for creating that missing knowledge AND (crucially!) we can predict what impact that missing knowledge will have on the rest of the plan or the project outcome. Same goes for risk management, where the assumption is that project risks can be identified at the outset and contingency plans can be created for dealing with them.
If we look beyond the agile methods and frameworks, what we are really talking about is epistemology. What can be known? How is knowledge created? What will its impact be? The real big difference that Agile brought, first to software development and then elsewhere, was not the tools, the methods, or even the culture, but the shift in thinking, mindset and the way we see the world.
Agile starts with the assumption that the (project) outcome and the way to get to that outcome are uncertain. And it’s not the “known unknowns” kind of uncertainty that is expected in a plan & control approach, but that nastier unforeseeable uncertainty, or unknown unknowns. It’s not only that we don’t know what we don’t know, but by definition we cannot know until after the fact. And this may be hard to grasp, as it was for the manager who made it to the Real Life Dilbert Moments by saying "What I need is a list of specific unknown problems we will encounter."
Everything will be affected by how you view the world: organisational strategy and structures, team practices, processes, tools, behaviours, culture... The approach you take will come down to seeing the world as inherently predictable and subject to careful planning, or as complex, unpredictable, continuously emerging and unfolding.
This is why so many organisations are having trouble adopting agile tools and methods. They try to operate them with a mindset that is firmly rooted in classical Newtonian / Cartesian deterministic worldview. I would suggest a better approach is to practice becoming more sensitive to uncertainty. Plan what can be planned and controlled, and use a different set of tools for what can’t.
Other sources and references:
Pich, M. T., Loch, C. H., & De Meyer, A. (2002). On Uncertainty, Ambiguity, and Complexity in Project Management. Management Science, Vol. 48, No. 8, 1008-1023.
Louth, Jonathon (2011). From Newton To Newtonianism: Reductionism And The Development Of The Social Sciences. Emergence: Complexity & Organization, Vol. 13, No. 4, 63-83.
How Collaboration Agreements Lead to Better Meetings
Whether online or in-person, it is not uncommon for meeting participants to be doing anything but focusing on the topic at hand. And I get it. It is often worthwhile to take a hard look on the purpose and process of the meeting itself.
However, there's another side to the story that has nothing to do with us feeling like we'd rather be doing something else. It's just that we get easily distracted. We get a notification banner about a new email, glance at the text, and suddenly our thoughts are being carried away from the discussion and into our inboxes. All of it happens mostly on autopilot. We don't even think about it. Nowhere in that chain of events do we make a conscious decision about shifting our attention elsewhere.
One way to avoid these quirks of human nature and to have better, more focused meetings with artful participation and without coercion, is to take a little time and create a collaboration agreement for the meeting.
Simply put, ask people to discuss in pairs "what behavioural rules or principles should we all agree to, so that our time together will be productive and well spent?" A few minutes later, you can ask people to share what they discussed with the rest of the group.
I've run this exercise dozens of times in the beginning of workshops and important meetings, and every time people bring up the same things:
Focus on the topic at hand.
Close unneeded programs.
Put the phone on silent and out of sight.
Listen to what others have to say.
Don't be afraid to ask questions and clarifications.
Manage your own well-being (i.e. if you need to take a break, you can do it respectfully and the others can also recognise your need for a break with empathy.)
When someone proposes how we should act in the meeting, ask the rest of the group how they feel about the proposal. You can do this, for example, by calling a Roman vote where everyone puts their fist in toward the group (or the camera) and shows either:
Thumb up, indicating agreement with the proposal
Thumb sideways, indicating consent or agreement to move forward
Thumb down, indicating disagreement or concerns with moving forward
You can even do a quick Forms poll in Teams meetings to gauge initial reactions to the proposal. If there are no thumbs down, the proposal gets recorded into the collaboration agreement. Otherwise those concerns need to be addressed. Ask, for example, "what would need to change for the proposal to work for you?" After further discussion and refinement you can call in another vote to check for consensus.
The beauty of this method is that it is not the person leading the meeting who dictates to others how they should behave. Instead, everyone agrees together. This is what it means to create consensus. By starting a meeting in this manner, people also learn immediately that they have a voice in the shared meeting process.
It takes about 10-15 minutes to run this activity, so it's not beneficial for very short meetings. Unless those meetings are recurring. In that case you can do the collaboration agreement once, spending a little more time on it. Then at the beginning of every future meeting, you show the collaboration agreement as a reminder of what has been agreed together, and ask if anyone wants to propose changes or new items to be added.
Happy 2022! May your meetings be energizing and productive!
Playing Board Games in 2021
I've always enjoyed board games, but it wasn't until 2017 that I really got into the hobby. It has since become probably the most important social activity that I have. A container for having good time with friends.
When the pandemic hit in spring 2020, I started keeping track of the games I played. This was mostly to remind myself that even though we were not playing face-to-face as often as before, we were still enjoying games together, thanks to Tabletopia and Tabletop Simulator. And even though in-person gaming has since returned, I never stopped tracking my plays of different games.
Playing Stroganov on Tabletopia.
All in all I got to play 193 games in 2021, consisting of 88 unique titles. Meaning individual plays of a game, with the exception of some family games where a single play is so short that it makes more sense to track sessions instead. Only 16 of these plays were online.
The above figures do not include board games I play as mobile apps. I usually have at least one asynchronous game of Through the Ages and Yellow & Yangtze ongoing any given time. I've also played quite a few games of Root this way, and some games of Scythe and Terraforming Mars. The latter two I wouldn't mind playing even more, but unfortunately the matchmaking for asynchronous gameplay works so poorly that it could be considered broken.
When it comes to my most played games of 2021, I keep track of the time spent playing a game, and not just how many times it hits the table. Based on this, the games I've played the most in 2021 are:
Twilight Imperium 4th Edition (2 plays, 15h 55m)
Dune Imperium (6 plays, 12h 50m)
Stroganov (5 plays, 10h 15m)
Excavation Earth (4 plays, 9h 50m)
Lost Ruins of Arnak (7 plays, 9h 10m)
Kanban EV (4 plays, 9h 5m)
I thought I’d finally be done with Twilight Imperium 4 after this summer when we had to look for one edge case after another in the rulebook, making the game grind to a halt a little too often. But no. There is just nothing else like it.
Dune Imperium and Lost Ruins of Arnak are the clear "winners" of 2021 as far as I'm concerned. I've played both games solo and with other people, and I am looking forward to playing both more in 2022 with the upcoming expansions.
Stroganov is a game that is not even out yet here in Finland, but I took a liking to it and played it quite a bit on Tabletopia last spring, when its Kickstarter campaign was running.
Half of my plays of Excavation Earth are solo. I think there is something counterintuitive with how it plays, which makes it hard for new players to grasp. I almost put it for sale at one point, but eventually decided against it. It's a fascinating game and plays differently from anything else I have.
Soloing Excavation Earth. Such a gorgeous looking game!
For some reason it is really difficult for me to grasp how to be efficient in Kanban EV. It is also a beast to set up on the table. I ended up selling my copy, but have played it online since, and wouldn't mind playing more of it. It's not my favourite Vital Lacerda game (that honor goes to Lisboa), and The Gallerist has found its way on my table more times this year too.
Looking purely at how many times a game has been played, the following titles stand out in addition to the ones already mentioned:
High Society (8 plays, 4h 20m)
Babylonia (7 plays, 3h 45m)
The Gallerist (5 plays, 7h 45m)
Pax Viking (5 plays, 7h 30m)
The King Is Dead 2nd Edition (5 plays, 1h 55m)
I’ve played almost all Vital Lacerda games and owned most of them. Only The Gallerist (above) and Lisboa remain on my shelf.
High Society is probably the most fun I've ever had with a board game. Pretty much all the plays this year took place within a week with my relatives. They just wanted to keep playing it and nothing else.
Babylonia is a fantastic game that replaced Samurai on my shelf. It also received a lot of plays during the summer with my relatives.
Pax Viking was enjoyable but after 5 plays I felt I had enough of it and sold my copy.
Restricting the data to a calendar year means that some games are at a disadvantage. Due to this it's worth also mentioning Fort and Yedo Deluxe, which have gotten a lot of plays, and would have made the list had I extended the time frame by a couple of months. Gaia Project has also received a lot of attention from me, but mainly as a solo game.
Lastly, the games that get played often are not necessarily the most memorable gaming experiences of the year. Some of the highlights of 2021 have been Pax Renaissance 2nd Edition, which I played 3 games in a row with a friend. We just wanted to keep at it game after game. Iki proved to be an absolute delight that I got to experience in November for the first time. Calico, which I bought on a Black Friday sale, has become a surprise hit that our 4-year-old also likes to pretend-play alongside us.
The new edition of Pax Renaissance looks absolutely stunning!
When it comes to 2022, I am looking forward to the expansions to Dune Imperium and Lost Ruins of Arnak, as well as some new releases and Kickstarter deliveries including Carnegie, Nemesis Lockdown, The Transcontinental, and Stationfall. I also hope to get at least a semi-regular group together for playing Oath, which I got on the table only once in 2021.
And maybe when we move to a new apartment in March, we can finally fit a big enough dining table for playing Coffee Traders...
Have a great 2022! ;-)
Thoughts on Winter Frost
It was late last night that I finally got my second collection of images ready. I felt so tired towards the end that it was hard to focus on the text on my computer screen. But damned if I didn’t finish it on this sitting, as I had expected to have it out there already a month go…
Siege (4/6)
As I was already behind schedule, I opted to go with OpenSea again. Although I am very curious about e.g. Algorand, which seems to combine NFTs with eco-friendly activities such as planting trees. I wouldn’t mind donating my proceeds from NFT sales towards mitigating climate change. And speaking of mitigation, you might want to take a look at GoClimate (formerly GoClimateNeutral), which has a very simple emissions calculator and offers a way to offset your personal CO2 footprint via monthly payments.
My first collection of images was very much a ‘Greatest Hits’ type of thing. This time I wanted to tell a story. It was meant as a 5x5 (5 images, 5 copies of each available for sale), but in the end I added a sixth image as a sort of an epilogue.
Emergence (6/6)
When it comes to the overall mood, I have been listening to a lot of Swallow the Sun, Atlas, and Kauan while curating and editing these images. Let’s just take a moment to appreciate what a year 2021 has been at least for metal fans! When tours got canceled, many artists put their energy into writing and recording music. And it shows. Soen, Seven Spires, Leprous, and Cradle of Filth have been killing it!
Hope you enjoy the collection and as I am still very much tipping my toes into NFTs, all good advise is appreciated!
To change behaviour, change the environment
To make behaviour change sustainable, take a design approach. This applies equally well to both our personal lives and to our work organisations.
Willpower is for jocks. A limited resource to begin with, made even less useful by being depleted by simple decisions, like what to wear to work or eat for lunch. Constantly switching between tasks seems to be a good way to expend it as well. So relying on willpower to change your (or someone else’s) behaviour is not a sustainable strategy.
But what if you changed the environment instead?
Trying to cut back on candy and snacks? Clear out the cupboards. It’s much easier to avoid foods that take some trouble to obtain. If you need to go to the local store every time to satisfy a craving, it’s less likely that you’ll actually do it.
Trying to start exercising in the morning? Aim for 10 minutes to make the goal easy to achieve and to build positive reinforcement. Then put your sneakers and sportswear next to the bed before going to sleep.
When I finally realised that checking Facebook was likely to put me in a bad mood, I deleted the app. And the apps you want to spend less time on, but don’t want to get rid off completely? Put them in other screens and into folders. The more clicks it takes, the less likely it is you’re going to open them accidentally and without intent.
Want to watch less TV and read more? Leave the remote to another room. And when you finally come home from work and collapse on the couch, have a book waiting at arms reach.
Changing the environment is also the smart and sustainable way to create organisational change. Design processes, metrics, rewards, incentives, information flows, tools, management systems, goal setting, performance reviews etc. in a way that they support the behaviours you want to see from the people in your organisation, and discourage those that are toxic.
Want to be more innovative? Get rid of metrics that encourage people to protect business as usual. Replace them with ones that reward creativity, controlled risk-taking and learning. Get rid of informational silos and start using systems that support total transparency.
And treat those changes as experiments. Organisations are complex adaptive systems, where seemingly simple changes can have surprising and significant side effects. Just look at what happened in Yahoo: Fixed project-based employee evaluations meant that none of the top engineers wanted to work with each other, as it would have reflected poorly on their individual performance scores. Consequently the most important projects never had the best possible team working on them.
Of course, none of this matters if you don't first figure out what the desired personal and organisational behaviours are.
Further reading:
Heath, Chip & Heath, Dan (2010). Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard. New York: Random House.
McChrystal, Stanley et al. (2015). Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World. New York: Penguin Publishing Group.
Do it with intent
Reminding yourself of the intent behind an action is a powerful way to avoid distractions and procrastination.
I get distracted easily. If a website takes a few seconds too long to load, I have already opened Facebook or Twitter on another tab. And the next fifteen minutes have disappeared into the endless news feed slot machine, before I realise I was supposed to be doing something else. (1)
I am also a pathological procrastinator. I get stuck in a loop where I first check email, then Slack, then calendar, then Evernote, and round it goes to email again. Evernote houses the things I should be doing, but to actually get started with them requires concentration. And if I could concentrate, I would not have been sucked into the loop in the first place.
Luckily I have found the closest thing to a solution so far. It struck me a few months ago as I was taking a walk outside. The key is to have intent, a purpose for the action. Stopping yourself in the middle of whatever you are doing and asking: “What is your intent?”
I am not saying you should stop using Facebook, and I certainly spend my fair share of time on Twitter. But whenever you use those services, ask yourself that question. Is there a purpose for checking them at the moment, or are you just escaping from whatever it is you should be doing? Are you resisting something?
This question can also be used outside work context. Have you ever seen someone channel-surf with intent? Probably not. It’s another kind of loop. You feel like you should be doing something else, but are lacking the energy or interest for it, so the loop draws you in. But if that is the case, then why not intentionally do something relaxing and enjoyable, instead of just procrastinating and feeling the worse for it?
Go outside. Play some games. Watch your favourite show.
We are not machines. Our energy level and mental capacity fluctuates. Trying to act like a machine does no good.
Footnotes:
1) You should really read this article: How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds – from a Magician and Google’s Design Ethicist. It’s superb.
Should “news” come with a warning label?
An opinion based on falsehoods and corrupted data is worse – and potentially way more dangerous – than having no opinion at all.
An opinion based on falsehoods and corrupted data is worse – and potentially way more dangerous – than having no opinion at all. Or at least that’s the conclusion I came to after a must-read article in The Guardian, titled How technology disrupted the truth.
In the age of clickbait, and with genuine news outlets struggling with their business models, quality reportage is hard to come by. Facts get distorted and misrepresented, due diligence has become a thing of the past, and as the article points out, media has started to publish outright falsehoods in hopes of getting those clicks and shares.
When there is so much more incentive to create noise – sensation, clickbait, and negativity bias (fear sells) – finding signal becomes more difficult. It’s simple statistics. Even though there are outlets producing quality journalism, with a conviction to find the truth and facts, they are vastly outnumbered by sensation-seeking fear mongerers.
The major issue is this: people are known to form their worldview based on what they see and hear in their immediate environment. This environment does not include just the tabloid headlines in the local supermarket, but also the things that find their way into your Facebook news feed. And when most of that consists of unverified facts, misinformation and outright falsehoods, we are turning into a society where public opinion is increasingly based on something other than truth or factual information.
This a dangerous course to take. Brexit just happens to be the most recent and major example of what this kind of environment can lead to. In that case the public opinion was consciously manipulated and misled, as has become evident after the referendum. And it is now having staggering implications to the British society.
When it became impossible to deny that cigarettes are a major cause of cancer, governments started to require warning labels in the packs. Tabloid news and clickbait journalism is turning into something even more dangerous. At least with cigarettes most of the harm befalls to the smoker, not the rest of the society.
I support freedom of speech in principle, but perhaps certain media outlets should likewise be required to carry a warning label. Determined by how vigorously they pursue journalistic quality and integrity. “May contain falsehoods and unvalidated claims. A worldview based on misinformation is highly detrimental to your personal well-being and to those around you.”
Being Considerate: Explained in Finnish Terms
What it means to be considerate and inconsiderate. Explained in a way that any Finnish person can relate to.
You are the only one in a public sauna. After finishing, you leave the empty water bucket in the steam room. You are being inconsiderate.
If you take the bucket out and leave it next to the faucet, you are not being particularly considerate, but I wouldn't call you inconsiderate either. At least the next person can see the bucket and fill it up before going in.
When you refill the bucket and leave it ready for the next person who uses the sauna, you are being considerate. Bravo!
For those unfamiliar with the Finnish sauna, there is always a furnace with hot rocks on top. You throw water on the rocks to generate hot and humid air that fills the room, makes you sweat and purifies the soul.
Adaptiveness is the new efficiency
In the modern business environment, characterised by increasing complexity, chasing efficiency is quickly becoming a fool's game. Efficiency is inevitably at odds with the organisation's adaptive capability. The time, energy, and effort that optimisation takes has diminishing returns on investment. And in fast-moving industries many optimisation efforts may already be too late upon arrival.
This article was published originally in Quality Intelligence Hub in February 2015. It is now presented here with minor changes and corrections.
Recently my Twitter feed and the blogs I follow have featured an unusually large amount of articles on artificial intelligence. According to the author Sam Harris, the often-stated goal of AI research is to create human-level intelligence. However, he points out that it is a false goal. The computers we use today already possess superhuman capabilities of e.g. computation and storage of information, and that "any future artificial general intelligence (AGI) will exceed human performance on every task for which it is considered a source of ‘intelligence’ in the first place.”
This is a rather powerful vision. Considering how quickly the ability of computer programs to understand natural language has progressed (see, for example, IBM’s Watson), and how digital assistants such as Siri, Google Now, and Microsoft’s Cortana already possess believable communication capabilities, a future depicted in the movie Her, where we communicate verbally with an actual AI, suddenly seems a lot closer.
It would be easy to dismiss this as overoptimistic technophilia, but the fact is that the history of technological advancement progresses in a non-linear fashion. Our entire way of life has changed radically since the industrial revolution some 250 years ago, but within that time frame you can also identify many smaller periods of significant advancements. A pattern emerges. The time frames have consistently become shorter.
Consider how technology has affected our lives in the past five years, then past 10, 20, 50, or 100 years. In order to predict the next 10 years we cannot look at the past 10 and draw a straight line. Every consequent year in the future will see more rapid advancement than the year that came before it.
Are there limits to this? Possibly, but there are also hints of technologies – such as AI – that may result in larger leaps that impact practically everything that comes after. The Internet of Things is an example of such emergence taking place at this very moment. Just consider all the aspects of everyday life that have become affected by the Internet in two short decades, or the fact that the horse remained state-of-the-art in human mobility for thousands of years before the invention of the automobile.
The flipside of efficiency is lost adaptive capability
The challenge this presents to organisations is one rooted in their past. If you look at the history of management practice, you can see it has largely been a race towards efficiency, although the methods and language have changed over the years. The problem with efficiency, however, is that it can only be pursued successfully in a relatively stable environment. Otherwise you risk becoming efficient in doing things that have already become outdated. (1)
When you try to optimise a system, it means reducing variance in the operating parameters of that system. Where an established organisation has found an efficient way to produce certain goods or services for its customers, it has also become restricted by the way those goods and services are being produced. The more specialised and efficient a production line is, the more difficult and expensive it tends to be to reconfigure it – beyond the accepted level of variance that is. Each McDonald’s restaurant needs to follow McDonald’s operations manual, and changing it is not a trifle matter.
This is what allows start-ups to challenge industry giants. As the business environment changes, what used to be an optimised system in the previous environment may no longer be very well optimised at all. A new performance peak has emerged, and an agile, quick-learning start-up is often in a better position to discover and exploit that peak. Think of Kodak, which actually pioneered digital sensors for cameras but was so caught up in its own organisation, trapped in the beast of its own design, that its attempts at creating new kind of organisational alignment, better suited to a digital world, never succeeded. (2)
Efficiency, while it does work in a stable environment, comes with reduced ability to adapt to changes – be they internally induced or originating from outside the organisation. And because business environments are changing faster than ever, trying to optimise for efficiency is becoming a fool’s game. The time, energy, and effort that optimisation takes has diminishing returns on investment. And in fast-moving industries many optimisation efforts may already be too late upon arrival.
A new model of organisation
However, I do believe that organisations can be designed in such manner that they can capture the best of both worlds. The key idea is to recognise which areas are changing faster than others, requiring more adaptive capability, and which ones are relatively stable and can therefore benefit from traditional performance improvement measures. For example, tax accounting tends to be an area that is highly structured, and where optimisation and eliminating variance are something to be desired. On the opposite there are areas that constantly need to reinvent themselves, such as product and service innovation.
In many of the in-between areas there are usually specific things that might benefit from more rigid structures and processes, but also multiple aspects where overenthusiastic top-down control results in nothing but loss of adaptive capability and ability for self-renewal.
Another rule of thumb to keep in mind is Pareto’s 20/80 principle, or that 20% of effort tends to account for 80% of the results, and each subsequent percentage of performance improvement becomes more and more costly to achieve. The principle can also be inverted: 80% of the adaptive capability of a system is lost in order to achieve that final 20% increase in performance. Extrapolated further it can also mean that 64% of the total effort (80% of 80%) goes to achieving the final 4% (20% of 20%) increase in efficiency, and vice versa in the lost adaptive capability.
When seen from this perspective, the role of managers and leaders changes. They need to become architects and designers who build structures and conditions that steer their organisations in the right direction, but are at the same time loose and flexible enough to allow for bottom-up, self-organised, goal-oriented activity to emerge. And in self-organisation lies the key for achieving adaptability and innovativeness, while staying true to the organisation’s business goals.
For a deeper dive into the topic, I would suggest the books Competing on the Edge by Shona Brown and Kathleen Eisenhardt, and Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
References:
1) Kiechel, Walter III (2012). The Management Century. Harvard Business Review, November 2012, 63-75.
2) Lucas Jr, Henry C., & Goh, Jie Mein (2009). Disruptive technology: How Kodak missed the digital photography revolution. Journal of Strategic Information Systems, Vol. 18, 46-55.
An exercise in seeing and self-reflection
What follows is a highly self-indulgent post. You have been warned.
Since the beginning of the year, I have spent most of my waking hours thinking about the future of organisations, and how to better integrate innovation and adaptiveness into their fabric of being. This interest stems from two sources: Firstly, I have been consulting and coaching organisations especially in the area of Experimentation-Driven Innovation for the past two years. Secondly, when I was doing research on how to manage uncertainty in innovative projects, I stumbled on the concept of complex adaptive systems, which fundamentally changed the way I see organisations.
This different way of seeing and thinking about organisations presents a huge opportunity. The 20th century management practice effectively treats organisations as mechanistic systems – an approach that is both outdated and ill-suited to today's fast-changing business environments. Just consider how much waste can be found in information flows and organisational practices, such as meetings, decision-making, budgeting, talent management, etc.
Complexity (not complicatedness) is not that easy concept to grasp, especially if your belief system is firmly rooted in the mechanistic Newtonian/Cartesian worldview. Yet it is an essential principle for successfully integrating the exploitation of existing business opportunities to the exploration of new ones – a characteristic that long-lasting organisations have in common, and one that seems notoriously difficult to reach.
As I am currently on the lookout for a new job opportunity (while also to developing my own consultancy and expertise in these areas), it occurred to me that I should try to communicate better what I mean by organisation design and innovation management. Although I treat these as separate topics, there is significant overlap because an organisation that is not designed to innovate is also not likely to survive in the long-term.
What started from an attempt to visualise these two focus areas and the topics that fall under them (and in which I have expertise), turned into a deeper exercise in self-reflection and how I see myself. Because of this I decided to write this blog post, and perhaps encourage you to try it as well.
What follows is the mind map of me.
Front-End
These are the things I talked about above. This is how I see myself creating value. There are the two main focus areas (Innovation Management, Organisation Design), and more specific concepts, topics and practical approaches that guide my thinking and doing. The hands-on work in both areas comes down mostly to consulting, facilitating, coaching, training, speaking and writing.
Back-End
These are the things that work beneath the surface and enable me to create value in the world. You can think of the Front-End stuff being about creating outcomes, and Back-End stuff about the sustained ability to do so.
At first I wanted to divide this section into two areas: physical performance and mental performance, but that would have been somewhat contrived. There is no clear dividing barrier between the two. Take sleep for example. It is a physical activity with significant impact on both physical andmental performance. Same goes with exercise and nutrition, although to a somewhat lesser degree.
This is why I ended up calling these three things the essentials. If one of them is not in order, everything else will suffer as a result. This is also about more than just recognising their importance. I have spent hundreds of hours studying the three and their relation to overall health, and as a result profoundly changed my life.
Thinking habits are activities that help especially in the mental performance -side of things. You can consider them as exercise for the mind. Reading nonfiction is something I have been doing for years. If you are what you eat, then your thinking would be what you read. Books are tremendously valuable in challenging and expanding your mental models of the world.
The two other practices in this category are meditation and journaling (a form of reflection). My main inspiration for both has been Josh Waitzkin, who is a top-end performance coach, and vouches for their importance. Granted, these are somewhat new parts in my daily routine, but they have become sticky enough during the past few months that I dare to present them here.
Lastly, there are certain principles I try to adhere to, and given my knowledge of them warrant mentioning. I am definitely an advocate of the human performance aspects that stem from positive psychology. To me philosophy is largely about morality, ethics, contentment and living a good life. In this area I am particularly drawn to the practical aspects of Stoic writings.
Balance and effortless productivity are somewhat unspecific, but nonetheless important things that I want to try to keep in mind. The former is more about life in general and being wary of single-mindedness, whereas the latter is about trying to be more aware of my energy levels and clarity of thinking. Getting more things done without inner resistance.
Misc
There are things that have a meaningful role in my life, but which are not really related to the created value or outcomes, nor to the internal processes. When it comes to relaxing, I enjoy watching quality movies and tv shows with my wife, playing games - not just for fun, but also tactically to improve productivity – seeing friends, reading fiction and listening to music. One big thing that usually results in peak life experiences is traveling (which I forgot to put to the mind map). Photography is another one.
Then there are the networks that I am actively in touch with. I was prompted to open them up in the picture, because frankly put they play a huge multi-faceted role in life, and are increasing in importance as the boundaries between traditional groups and segregation of activities are disappearing.
I was wondering if I should also have a section here called IT, considering that I'm pretty handy with anything related to computers. On top of that, there are more specific knowledge areas such as my expertise in SAP User Rights Management, image manipulation, Wordpress, and HTML, CSS and Swift programming languages. But then again, I cannot really see how these would play a large role in the areas where I feel I can create the most value.
What do you think? Do you feel like you understand who I am a little better now? Or was this, as I warned in the beginning, nothing but self-indulgent mumbo-jumbo? For me the greatest value was not in listing the individual items, but in categorising them. This is where insights were born. Especially when it comes to balancing the Back-End and Front-End activities.
How would your "me map" look like if you made one? Please let me know in the comments.
The 5 things I learned in two months of meditation
According to research done in Harvard, I have a new brain now. Well, perhaps not quite, since the participants in the study clocked an average of 27 minutes a day over two months, whereas I'm averaging 20 minutes a day, six days a week. So I'll give my new brain a little more time to develop.
Nevertheless, It's been around two months since I started a (almost) daily meditation practice. This has not been my first attempt at meditating regularly, but I find it easier now than couple years ago, when I last tried to get into the habit. There are a few reasons why that is, which I will get to later in this article.
The approach I use is called vipassana, or mindfulness/insight meditation. It is simply the practice of being fully present in the moment, becoming aware of your breathing, other sensations, sounds, and even thoughts as they appear in the awareness. Too often we get carried away by our thinking. This practice helps you recognise when that happens, and return your attention to the present moment.
Meditation also makes you more aware of the fact that your self is not the same as your thinking. Thoughts arise spontaneously to the awareness, but since there is also a part of you that can observe those thoughts, the thoughts themselves cannot be what you truly are. If that were the case, then who or what is doing the observing?
But why meditate in the first place? I have known for quite a few years already about the research and positive outcomes associated with meditation, but that knowledge alone has not been enough to start doing it regularly. How many people smoke even though they are fully aware of the consequences? Behaviour change takes more than knowing something intellectually.
As you might know, I'm a huge advocate of podcasts and audio books. They are a wonderful way to learn new things utilising time–such as commuting, cleaning up the apartment, and long walks–that would otherwise go to waste. I have two new favourites: Dan Carlin's Hardcore History, which is so well thought out and narrated that even though I'm not a history buff, I am completely drawn into the stories, which range from protestant reformation to Genghis Khan, and to the morality and ethics behind the atomic bomb. My other new favourite is The Tim Ferriss Show.
Tim does mostly interviews of people who can easily be counted as the top 1% in their field, whether it's venture capital, entrepreneurship, human performance, writing, coaching, arts or innovation. For example, most recently he did an hour+ long interview with Arnold Schwarzenegger. To listen to Arnold speak in Nordic Business Forum would have cost you several hundred euros. The podcast you can download for free.
After listening to a few episodes of The Tim Ferriss Show, it is impossible not to notice how many of these world-class people mention their meditation habit. Josh Waitzkin, who coaches top-level athletes, finance managers, and other business people, even claims that meditation is one of the key practices for high-level performance improvement. Chase Jarvis meditates, so does Pixar's president Ed Catmull, and most recently The Governator mentioned that a year of Transcendental Meditation changed his life.
I thought, with this many people vouching for meditation, maybe I should give it another chance.
Now that I have two months of regular practice under my belt, I feel confident in sharing some of the lessons learned.
1. It's ok to be comfortable
The last time I tried meditating, sitting cross-legged on the floor or on a sofa, my back started aching real bad after a few minutes. Soon the pain made it almost impossible to concentrate.
You don't need to be in a lotus position to meditate. There's even a thing called walking meditation. If you experience pain like me, try sitting on a chair. An upright position is preferable, though, in order to not get drowsy and fall asleep.
Nowadays I sit on a hefty cushion on the floor, cross-legged, with a pillow between my back and a wall, so I can lean a little bit and thus avoid back pain.
2. It helps to get some help, especially when getting started
I don't think I would have gotten where I am without this How to Meditate -introductory article by Sam Harris (who was also interviewed in The Tim Ferriss Show), and his guided meditations. For the first two or three weeks half my sessions were done while listening to them. During the other sessions I listened to ambient ocean or rain sounds, which I found on Spotify.
Yes, it's ok to listen to music, ambient sounds, or whatever else you find helpful–especially if the environment is a bit noisy. I avoid music with lyrics, though, as that seems to make it more difficult to keep from getting lost in thought.
Now I mostly use Sattva (available for iOS and Android) for ambient soundtrack and to track how much time I spend meditating.
3. Meditation is exercise for the mind
If you want to get in a better shape physically, you wouldn't go to the gym and quit after the first day, when you realise that you can't do a 2.5 times bodyweight deadlift. You start with the weight you can manage and build strength gradually. The key is to keep practicing, not to reach an arbitrary goal.
I find it useful to approach meditation with the same mindset. It is a form of exercise, but instead of targeting a muscle, it's targeting the brain. Don't get frustrated if you seem unable to quiet your mind and constantly lose yourself in thoughts. Each time you notice having been lost in thought, and return again to the sensation of breathing, is like doing another repetition in the gym.
Gradually it becomes easier to quiet the mind, and you might also start noticing some rather exciting new sensations, one of which could be described as being hyperaware of everything within your sphere of experience. At least for me this is something that has started to happen of late during my practice.
4. Know your whys
It's easier to get motivation for doing something when you are well aware of why you are doing it. When it comes to meditation, there are multiple studied benefits. For me the main goal was to better cope with an uncertain time in my life (no income since January, trying to develop my own business and find new opportunities), without succumbing to anxiety or depression. So far the results have been pretty amazing. Although it would of course be impossible to draw a causal link from meditation to staying positive, as I can't say for sure what would have happened if I hadn't started meditating.
Secondary goal was to see if I can increase the ability of my unconscious mind to generate creative insights. I have realised, especially after I started teaching myself programming, that many of the more difficult problems do not get solved by using force. Instead, detaching yourself from the task at hand, and giving time for the unconscious mind to come up with an answer is a better and more effortless method. Also, according to Josh Waitzkin, learning how to effectively use the unconscious mind is another key skill of the high-performing people.
5. Find your time and stick to it
Figure out when is the best time for you to meditate. I have found there to be a significant difference between mornings, afternoons and evenings. It is a lot easier to concentrate in the morning, after breakfast and a cup of coffee. The quality of the practice is better, and it also gives a great start and clarity of thought for the rest of the day.
Being consistent with the timing and meditating every day–even if it's just for ten minutes or less–will also help in turning it into a habit.
Did I pique your interest? If you decide to try meditation, let me know how it goes in the comments. Also, if you know any good resources on the topic I'd be happy to hear about them.
Newton's ghost and management science
Last week I read an interesting journal article on how the scientific revolution started by Isaac Newton was not just constrained in the scientific domain, but became a cultural revolution as well. What started with Newton in the 17th century–the belief that the mysteries of the natural world can be conquered by rationality and reasoning–has guided much of human endeavours ever since, and continues to influence our lives even today.
By unraveling the mysteries of the universe, Newton became a shining example of our thinking prowess. With his work on the natural laws governing the universe, our culture adopted the idea that we have the brainpower to eventually understand all of nature. And soon it was not just the natural domain, but social sciences as well became enthralled by the Newtonian paradigm: that we can understand society and human behaviour by using a Newtonian, reductionist approach.
Eventually Albert Einstein and others demonstrated that Newton's mechanics fail in the realm of subatomic particles. He did not refute Newton's work, but rather complemented it. Complexity theory should be seen in a similar manner. It does not refute the validity of reductionist and deterministic approaches in the context of non-complex systems. But like Newton's mechanics not being able to explain the behaviour of subatomic particles, we should acknowledge that complex systems present a context where the reductionist and deterministic approaches are bound to fail.
This is a paradigm shift that is slowly taking place. Yet when talking about human organisations and institutions, its impact has not really even started to show itself. The few companies (e.g. W.L. Gore and Semco come to mind) that seem to have intrinsic understanding of complexity, and how to take advantage of it, are seen as oddballs and exceptions. That is because you cannot simply copy what Gore or Semco are doing and expect it to work in your organisation, but by using complexity principles you can create your own working model.
Being in its infancy, the application of complexity theory–and the complex adaptive systems framework–in organisation design represents a huge opportunity for those who have the courage to move first, and to abandon the century-old model of industrial organisation.
If Gary Hamel claims that "...your company has 21st century, internet-enabled business processes, mid-20th century management processes, all built atop 19th century management principles," what remains unsaid is that those 19th century management principles are grounded on 17th century natural science, and traceable specifically to Isaac Newton and René Descartes.
References:
Louth, Jonathon (2011). From Newton To Newtonianism: Reductionism And The Development Of The Social Sciences. Emergence: Complexity & Organization, Vol. 13, No. 4, 63-83.
The edge of chaos: Where complexity science meets organisational performance
One of the things I particularly like about viewing organisations through the lens of complexity science is that it does not just attempt to describe organisations, but it also prescribes how they should operate in order to maximise performance. There are two key concepts in this: fitness landscapes and the edge of chaos.
Imagine a mountain range with many jagged peaks. Some are perhaps a few hundred meters tall, while others stretch up thousands of meters, reaching high above the clouds. This landscape represents the competitive environment of a specific industry. The individual peaks stand for different ways an organisation can chase performance. The higher the peak, the better the performance. There are three conditions:
A company may occupy only one peak at a time;
The height of the peaks cannot be seen very well when standing on the ground. Instead, one needs to occupy a peak in order to better survey the landscape;
The landscape itself changes. Peaks may rise and fall as time passes.
A fitness landscape? Or perhaps just a regular landscape.
Let's take this metaphor further by using Nokia as an example. When they decided to enter the mobile phone industry, they effectively entered into an entirely new mountainous landscape. And as they were one of the first companies there, it was not possible to see which of the performance peaks one should attempt to climb because no one knew where the highest peaks were. One had to engage in exploration. Nokia did this well, managing to find and scale one of the highest peaks, setting up shop there and becoming the world's largest mobile phone manufacturer.
Gradually they became better and better at exploiting the opportunities found in their performance peak, increasing efficiency and operational excellence. All was well and good until the landscape started changing. The peak they had found and successfully exploited began to fall in the shadow of other peaks, which were discovered and exploited by companies such as Apple and Google.
The more turbulent the industry, the faster the fitness landscape changes. Old performance peaks become obsolete and new ones arise.
This is a story that has repeated itself countless of times across different industries: The established corporations become stagnant, focused on exploiting their current competences and position in the competitive environment, and failing to see that the environment is not anymore the same it was when they became dominant. Or even if they see that change is inevitable, the efforts to resist it tend to be stronger than the efforts to innovate.
They become incapable of dismantling all the structures built for successfully exploiting the performance peak they have settled on. Without this conscious removal of structure and open engagement in a period of exploration it is not possible to find new and more promising peaks. Think, for example, the inability of recording industry to take advantage of digitalisation, or the lackluster response of American car industry to increasing competitive pressures. Established companies have a tendency to become so focused on the position built on a given performance peak that moving to a new one, and learning again how to exploit it, will never take place. Or if it will, it is only in the face of absolute necessity and involving considerable pain.
Startups are another great example. They are unencumbered by existing structures, built to exploit a particular peak in their industry, which means that they are free to explore the landscape to discover new larger peaks. The concept of fitness landscapes also explains why many initially successful startups become vulnerable later in their life: after finding and settling on a newly discovered performance peak, their focus shifts from exploration to exploitation, optimisation and operational excellence, which in turn makes them forget how to scan the landscape for changes and engage in exploration.
It is an easy thing to say that companies need to cultivate the ability to simultaneously exploit performance peaks in their competitive environment, while also engaging in exploration to discover new higher peaks. To actually do it is a different story, and this is where the edge of chaos comes in.
Organisations like other Complex Adaptive Systems perform best when they are at the edge of chaos. It is a place where the organisation has just enough structure to stay cohesive, preventing it from being pulled apart by competing internal and external forces. Emphasis on just enough. Because the openness to chaos, the ability to dismantle existing structures, to change shape rapidly, they all precede the ability to innovate and to explore new performance peaks in the ever-changing competitive environment. As stated by Shona Brown and Kathleen Eisenhardt:
...the edge of chaos lies in an intermediate zone where organisations never quite settle into a stable equilibrium but never quite fall apart, either. This intermediate zone is where systems of all types—biological, physical, economic, and social—are at their most vibrant, surprising, and flexible. The power of a few simple structures to generate enormously complex, adaptive behaviour—whether flock behaviour among birds, resilient government (as in democracy), or simply successful performance by major corporations — is at the heart of the edge of chaos. The edge of chaos captures the complicated, uncontrolled, unpredictable but yet adaptive (in technical terms, self-organised) behaviour that occurs when there is some structure but not very much. The critical managerial issue at the edge of chaos is to figure out what to structure, and as essential, what not to structure.
- Competing on the Edge: Strategy as Structured Chaos (Brown & Eisenhardt, 1998)
To stay at the edge of chaos requires energy and conscious effort. Complex Systems have a natural tendency to swing either to the chaotic (i.e. to fall apart), or the static (to become stagnant, controlled, and bureaucratic). Organisations need to maintain activities that are purposefully designed to disrupt the existing behaviour. Activities such as experimentation, or the continuous effort to test what works and what does not work, resulting in learning, and the discovery of new opportunities and new performance peaks. Another method is time-pacing, or the systemic effort to generate periodic change from within (e.g. 3M's self-imposed rule that each year 30 % of revenues must come from new products, forcing the company to stay innovative).
My personal experience from different organisations is that there typically is way too much structure and way too little openness for chaos. Yes, some structure will be necessary in order to achieve anything, but it quickly becomes a hindrance to the long-term survivability and performance of the organisation. Here are some questions to get you started in figuring out where and how much structure is needed:
How is the competitive environment of the organisation? The more uncertain, complex, and turbulent, the more the organisation needs to lean towards chaos.
What is the organisations business? An organisation dealing with one-time products and services (e.g. creative agencies, consultancies), or innovative new technologies needs to be more open to chaos and exploration than an organisation such as the IRS. In fact, I don't think anyone would enjoy seeing much experimentation and exploration in the way the government handles our taxes...
Where in the organisation is structure needed, and where it isn't? There are certain activities in every organisation that should go according to specification every single time, such as accounting, hiring, firing and others where e.g. laws need to be followed to the letter. Yet it is good to understand what kind of structure is really needed, and what is superfluous. For example, whether or not employees in accounting wear business attire has nothing to do with how well they are able to do their jobs, yet some companies have created a structure that regulates clothing. On the other hand, there are also activities–namely those that require creativity, agility and innovation–that are particularly sensitive to the harm caused by unnecessary structure.
Think broad guidelines instead of specific instructions. Self-organisation is a property of Complex Adaptive Systems, meaning that the system is capable of figuring out on its own how things should be done. In this sense the purpose of Organisation Design is not to provide specific rules for handling different situations, but to provide boundaries that ensure that the self-organising processes (unhindered by unnecessary structure) are aimed in the right direction. These boundaries include, for example, the organisations mission (why the organisation exists), vision (where it is headed), strategy (how it is going to get there), and values (what kind of behaviour it expects). When these are clearly understood by everyone in the organisation, it creates limits to the self-organising behaviour.
As a summary, the more there is structure in an organisation, the worse it tends to be at innovating, reacting to rapid changes in the business environment, discovering new opportunities, and taking advantage of them. Therefore it becomes an absolutely essential question of Organisation Design where, how much, and what kind of structures are needed, and what kind of mechanisms should be used to periodically challenge those structures, so that their value can be re-estimated in the light of the changing environment. For this, complexity science provides a framework, vocabulary, and way of thinking that is a clear departure from the century old model of industrial organisation.
References and further reading:
Brown, S. L., & Eisenhardt, K. M. (1998). Competing on the Edge: Strategy as Structured Chaos. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.
Carroll, T., & Burton, R. M. (2000). Organizations and Complexity: Searching for the Edge of Chaos. Computational & Mathematical Organization Theory, Vol. 6, Iss. 4, 319-337.
Lansing, Stephen J. (2003). Complex Adaptive Systems. Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 32, 183-204.
March, James G. (1991). Exploration and Exploitation in Organizational Learning. Organization Science, Vol. 2, No. 1, 71-87.
Starbuck, W. H., Barnett, M. L., & Baumard, P. (2008). Payoffs and pitfalls of strategic learning. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Vol. 66, Iss. 1, 7-21.
Thinking, systems and performance
Earlier this week I spotted a tweet by Hermanni Hyytiälä from Reaktor and it spurred me to write this article.
It is a wonderfully simple illustration making the point that the systems we build are based on the type of thinking we hold, and these two combined lead to certain outcomes. When it comes to modern day organisations, the 'thinking' part is still firmly founded on the history of mass production, with its origins in the early car industry. This production line view of the world, on the other hand, is very much based on the Newtonian/Cartesian deterministic model.
In plain English, the early scientific revolution and "scientism" got us to think that we can dismantle everything into pieces, and by rigorously studying those individual pieces we can understand and improve the whole. Production line as a management system for organising work is a representation of that thinking. You take a complicated end product, such as a car, and figure out how to accelerate the manufacturing and assembly of each of its parts.
Similar thinking can be seen in organisations as a whole. An organisation is a complex entity, and in order to understand and optimise it we have taken it apart, split it into functions such as HR, Procurement, Marketing, Accounting etc. Add to that different geographies, product lines, customer segments, and the modern-day love affair with cross-functional project work, and you end up with matrixes of so many layers that no one has clear understanding anymore of how the whole thing is supposed to work, who does what, and where.
These types of hierarchies in disguise and command and control organisations (system), based on determinist principles (thinking), perform well when two conditions are met: First, changes in the business environment of the organisation are predictable and take place at a slow pace. Second, the organisation itself is focused on routine, unchanging outputs, which makes optimisation (another term for incremental as opposed to radical innovation) the name of the game. Think of the early Ford motor company with only one product.
We of course know that the first condition is being challenged in almost every single industry. The speed of change has been accelerating for decades. As for the second condition, more and more organisations perform one-of-a-kind services or develop products that are unlike one another. Think of software development, video games, creative agencies, or even consumer electronics companies facing increasing pressure to create something truly innovative.
With these conditions being challenged, we need to think differently about organisations. And if the thinking–or the underlying principles and perceptions–does not change, organisational improvements are akin to tinkering and tweaking, whereas the real issue can be found at the core, at the fundamental principles of organising.
I wholeheartedly believe that the way to design better organisations can be found in complexity science. Seeing organisations as Complex Adaptive Systems gives you a whole different perspective than the traditional deterministic view. Organisations become alive, not static, and that is reflected in the design principles. The role of management changes from control to guidance. People's innate talents have more room to flourish, and barriers to innovate get removed. Command and control does not lose its role entirely, but becomes limited to areas where it makes sense.
This is the much needed change. Complexity theory and its principles, together with the concept of Complex Adaptive Systems (thinking) form the basic foundation for designing better organisations (system).
References and further reading:
Anderson, Philip (1999). Complexity Theory and Organization Science. Organization Science, Vol. 10, No. 3, 216-232.
Brown, S. L., & Eisenhardt, K. M. (1998). Competing on the Edge: Strategy as Structured Chaos. Harvard Business Review Press.
Carlisle, Y., & McMillan, E. (2006). Innovation in organizations from a complex adaptive systems perspective. Emergence: Complexity & Organization, Vol. 8, No. 1, 2-9.
McMillan, E., & Carlisle, Y. (2007). Strategy as Order Emerging from Chaos: A Public Sector Experience. Long Range Planning, Vol. 40, Iss. 6, 574-593.
Wheatley, Margaret J. (2006). Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World. San Francisco: Berret-Koehler Publishers, 3rd edition.
Notes from Nassim Taleb's Antifragile
Antifragile by Nassim Taleb has to be one of the most interesting books I have read this year. It presents a plethora of concepts that are worth discussing, and carry meaning for one's personal life, as well as for business, society, and science. From this standpoint I paraphrased and extracted some of the topics that resonated with me the most when reading the book, and put them in a presentation. Originally I did this to start a discussion about these concepts with my colleagues, but I have now also uploaded the presentation to SlideShare.
I recommend reading the entire book, but if you are uncertain about whether or not you should, this should serve as something of an overview.