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Can we better equip ourselves to deal with constant change by seeing things through a new lens?
I started exploring this question with the Metathinking Manifesto, and I’m going to try and flesh out those ideas a bit further.
The Premise
A fundamental societal and cultural shift is underway as we transition deeper into an information society, characterized by globalization, a knowledge-based economy, human capital and social networks.
Central to this theme are 3 key trends:
- Growth of social technologies
- Increasing complexity of information
- Accelerating change
Understanding what these mean and why it should matter may require a reorientation in how we think about information, how we acquire and store it, and the context we create for fitting it into the big picture.
This ‘metathinking’ framework may increase our ability to develop strategies for systems level critical thinking, to rapidly adapt to change, and to create conditions that facilitate creativity and innovation.
My initial goal is to unpackage these three trends, and then identifying the strategies that can be used to develop foresight and skills for dealing with an increasingly fast-paced, complex global environment.
Trend #1: Social Technologies
“When social communication media grow in capability, pace, scope, or scale, people use these media to construct more complex social arrangements – that is, they use communication tools and techniques to increase their capacity to cooperate at larger and larger scales. Human history is a story of the co-evolution of tools and social practices to support ever more complex forms of cooperative society.”
– Technologies of Cooperation, IFTF
We’ve certainly seen this as the web has evolved over the years into a platform that allows us to connect, collaborate, and create in ways that were previously impossible. So now what?
In a recent Guardian article, After Social Networks, What’s Next?, VC Peter Thiel’s response to the question was to ask:
“Are we at the end of innovation of social networking? And is social networking the last innovation of the internet?”
If the goal of communication technologies is to connect to one another, then it makes sense. We all know the real-time web has arrived, and it’s about engagement, sharing, and relationship building.
The next step is to figure out how to make those connections do something for us: how do we leverage these vast networks?
Trend #2: Increasing Complexity & Compression
“The explosive development of the Internet and related information and communication technologies has brought into focus the problems of information overload, and the growing speed and complexity of developments in society. People find it ever more difficult to cope with all the new information they receive, constant changes in the organizations and technologies they use, and increasingly complex and unpredictable side-effects of their actions.”
– Francis Heylighen
Essentially, our communication tools are developing faster than we’re learning how to efficiently use them. Through social media technologies, we are able to build relationships and connect with one another at the global level, but we still haven’t fully grasped how to harness the power of these networks to help us filter and make sense of all the incoming information.
The other side to complexity is the complimentary process of STEM (Space, Time, Energy, Matter) Compression. To distill down a massive body of work into a phrase, it means: doing more, better, and with less. The idea is that as complexity increases, the STEM forces compress and informational processes increase in efficiency, which in turn allow for the next level of complexity.
This seems relatively straightforward – ‘how do we do more, better, and with less?’ is the question organizations ask themselves to stay profitable, what educators ask themselves in the face of budget cuts, and what we ask ourselves as we manage our households in a recession.
Some other examples:
Twitter’s 140 Character Limit
An article on Copyblogger, titled How Twitter makes You a Better Writer, lists three reasons the 140 character limit is effective:
- it forces you to be concise
- it forces you to exercise your vocabulary
- it forces you to improve your editing skills
In other words, the limitation is forcing us to learn to compress information in less space without it losing its value. It means information can be sent in short bursts and spread throughout multiple networks via the retweet feature. It means that information can find its way to the people who can extract its value and do something with it.
Pecha Kucha
If you’re a conference-goer, you’re probably familiar with this. It’s a presentation format that started in Japan in 2003. The presenter gets to show 20 slides, with each slide shown for 20 seconds before it automatically moves on to the next. That gives the presenter 6 minutes and 40 seconds to get their point across. It’s about avoiding “death by powerpoint,” but also about brevity.
Flickr’s 90 second Upload Limit
They say they’re “trying something new.” The ‘something new’ is forcing the user to learn how to filter information from noise.
Postrank Statistics
And finally, this post on ReadWriteWeb, How Blogging Has Changed Over The Last 3 Years (Stats), lists these findings:
“The big picture is that total engagement with online content is growing while on-site engagement is declining in significance, as off-site engagement, like link sharing on social networks, grows. Surprisingly, this off-site link sharing has also extended the lifespan of content.”
What that’s saying is that we’ve found a way to increase the efficiency of communicating our message. Here’s the conclusion:
“While the real-time web is all about lowering the latency,” Grigorik says, “the pervasive nature and number of people engaged in their communities and conversations (the Social Web) is helping with information discovery. People are worried that the real-time web will destroy their readership as everyone just gets distracted by the newest shiny thing on Twitter, but the numbers show something very different. It’s so easy to spread information now that it lasts longer and finds more niches – this trend is helping content travel further.”
It seems that the challenges we face with information overload are being supplemented by the tools that would solve those problems. It’s a matter of learning how to implement the systems that will harness the collective intelligence of the social web to provide information while filtering out noise.
Trend #3: Accelerating Change
The concept of accelerating change suggests that the rate of technological, social, economic, and cultural progress has been increasing throughout history. For the sake of semantics, lets just say that “progress” means ‘doing more with less.’
These dynamics have been observed in everything from agricultural productivity to the increasing power of information processing (Moore’s Law), utility of social networks (Reed’s Law), and more controversially, in human intelligence (Flynn Effect).
Why might this be important?
Because we experience time as linear, and live such short lives, it seems there has been sudden explosive technological growth over the past few decades:
But on an exponential scale, it seems relatively predictable:
What might that mean?
According to Ray Kurzweil:
“An analysis of the history of technology shows that technological change is exponential, contrary to the common-sense “intuitive linear” view. So we won’t experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century — it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today’s rate).”
I can’t even really conceive of what that means, so let’s look at something we can wrap our heads around.
Some of today’s shifts are covered in Social Media Revolution, a video illustrating the rapid adoption of social technologies and their implications for society and business:
Conclusion
These are some broad, macro-level trends that seem to have been co-evolving and fueling each other all throughout history, but are now becoming more apparent to us. If social networking is the end of innovation on the internet, perhaps one of our biggest challenges will be to figure out how to leverage these networks to filter through the noise, make sense of information, and solve problems collectively…
…and perhaps develop a new system for thinking and understanding the world altogether?
_________
My Prezi slideshow version of this post
I hope you made it to the end of this post. It’s dense, but I wanted to lay down the theory before moving on.
further reading
Complex Systems
Technologies of Cooperation – Institute for the Future
Understanding STEM Compression in Universal Change – John Smart
Control Over Perceived Environments (COPE) – Alvis Brigis
The Simulation Era – Alvis Brigis
A Brief History of Intellectual Discussion of Accelerating Change – John Smart
Total System Quantification – Toward the “Everything Graph” – Alvis Brigis @alvisbrigis
Complexity and Information Overload in Society (PDF) – Francis Heylighen
emergent by design 
Another really good, thought-provoking post Venessa!
I think the logic holds together pretty well. From a personal standpoint, I remain convinced that understanding the dynamics of networks (interpersonal, social, knowledge-sharing, transaction, etc.) is essential to figuring out how to cope with these issues.
Thanks Tim (@timkastelle)
Totally. Maybe I need to do a better job clarifying that that’s what I mean by social technologies. I consider it to include the tools, yes, but it really mainly involves the behaviors that are associated with the social dynamic. I mean, language is a technology too. I think we’ll start to see a clearer set of rules of etiquette develop online that people will agree to follow in order to get things done. Once that happens, we’ll be able to see the patterns to understand how the whole thing really works. I think it’ll just be a matter of getting a system in place.
Another smart post–but can you stop the room from spinning? One of the challenges that I have with the analysis is that the space is immense and overwhelming–anything exponential is. I can live with the ambiguity as we observe what emerges, but there seems to be some movement to tie all the information down and get to the understanding, already. I don’t think we can do that yet, but appreciate your chunking into consumable categories.
Hi Gwynne,
It’s definitely overwhelming. To me, all the more reason to at least try to have it on our radar so we’re not completely blindsided by the changes to come.
I don’t know that we’ll be able to “get to the understanding, already” – there’s just so much! But maybe if we can expand our frameworks a little, at least we can do a better job trying to keep up.
Interesting and thought provoking post. Some points that came to mind on reading your post.
1. Social Networks and platforms and their requisite responsibility toward their participants. As these services move to becoming platforms, individual rights and protection will perhaps need greater definition.
2. The transition from the “I” to the “We” is critical if collective intelligence and collaboration have a role in the development of expertise and ability.
3. The complexity of Social networks etc will likely result in contributions of individuals being available all across the digital domain. How will an individual manage a cohesive expert identity.
4. Will complexity create individuals who are able to manage this or will there be genuine experts. Managing complexity implies the ability to manage technology and keep up with change.
5. What does it mean in the context of history. Will the fragmentation result in a fragmented sense of history too?
6. Is there an implication in terms of have and have nots for people who are differently abled from all the skill sets defined in your post and in this comment.
Would like your thoughts..
Hi Syamant, glad for your input.
#1. individual rights and protection – I couldn’t agree more. I’ve been briefly touching over this recently, but I am going to put together a post soon to really get a discussion going about it. Thank goodness there are organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (@EFF) and the Peer to Peer Foundation (@mbauwens) that are focused on digital rights and open standards. If civil liberties got half as much attention as ‘social media marketing’ I wouldn’t be so worried.
#3. we may see the flourishing of a new job description – Online Identity Manager – the digital PR solution
#4. not sure what you mean by managing complexity – please explain
#5. that is a great question. maybe there will be a shift towards ‘presence’…. what all the Eastern religions tout – maybe it will be a path for people to be aware, to be present, and spend less time focused on the past or future because they don’t exist anyway. i don’t know.
#6. there has always been an implication in terms of the educated vs uneducated, don’t you think? the difference now is that the education isn’t locked in an institution that costs over $30k a year, making it completely inaccessible to the masses. if you have an internet connection and a desire to learn, you can be competitive.
maybe that’s a bit of an oversimplification, but think of it – people born today will understand how to navigate this space better than we do, so I think there will continue to be this co-evolution of culture and technology. and there will always be those who would rather not know, despite the cost.
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Great post. Just wondering if your Trend #2 should be expanded to:
Increasing complexity, availability and quantity of information.
you are ABSOLUTELY right. I just got done posting a response on the Future of Work, and the whole essence of it is about quantification of data.
When I wrote this post, I was going to add that to #2 (if you scroll to the end of the article, you’ll see I posted a link to Alvis Brigis’s thoughts on “Total System Quantification – Towards an Everything Graph”), but I didn’t specifically state it in that section.
Quantification is the bridge between Complexity and Compression –> we’re able to be more efficient with all this information/data by knowing how to tag, classify, and categorize it, and then retrieve it and fit it into the big picture.
Thanks for pointing that out.
Great post Venessa. I like how you play the three trends off one another – right at the middle resides metathinking. It’s a neat way to explain how acceleration, compression and social tech conspire to change our culture / thought architecture.
@ Rita Ferrari – Nice thought. 🙂 The way I see it, due to to Venessa’s Trend #3, accelerating change, or exponential technology growth, humans are increasing our rate and quality of interaction with the environment and generating massive amounts of data (eg, Zuckergberg’s Second Law, Exponential Data/Information) that we then work to convert into actionable knowledge (simulations, databases, etc). The two are critically related, dancing a dance that goes back to the beginnings of life in our universe. This process is core to our culture, economy and can help explain WHY contemporary social technologies have manifested as they have. Brain extensions like Twitter are critical accelerators of this process of info explosion –> knowledge explosion, as Venessa points out above when she links Twitter to STEM Compression.
@ Gwynne Kostin – I think we’ve been working to convert increasingly more info to knowledge over the entire history of our species. That said, I think there are two phenomena that may help put this sensation of information overload in context. 1) Accelerating Change – We humans may simply not be biologically/cognitively prepared for navigating the knee of convergent exponentials. 2) Self-Organized Criticality (SOC) in systems tends to push them to the brink in order to maximize learning and evolution/development. One might views humans as over-populating the planet, but on the flipside this could be viewed as the broader bio-system maximizing learning be proliferating the best sensor drone networks it’s ever created (us). 😛
Thanks Alvis.
Your point on Self-Organized Criticality reminds me of the idea of the Edge of Chaos in complex adaptive systems being where innovation and efficiency reside. (http://www.targetprocess.com/blog/2008/12/edge-of-chaos-and-hyper-productive.html). we’re on to something. 🙂
Awesome link. I’ve been comparing agile dev to SOC / living systems for a while now, but haven’t read anything that directly links them. Dubakov is a CADS+Agile savant!
PS – You guys may enjoy this CRUDE (nowhere near as elegant as Venessa’s custom graphics) diagram detailing how Inner Space (global mind – web) and Outer Space (global body – technology) conspire to expand the phase space for knowledge creation.
http://memebox.com/futureblogger/show/915-nova-spivack-s-web-as-world-observation-leads-us-further-down-the-rabbit-hole
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First, I love this. Great thinking and articulation.
The only place I take issue is with the arrow of directionality implicit in it. I think that, given the experience most everyone alive today has known, we are predisposed to believe that increasing complexity, compression, etc. are what lie ahead. But that directionality is certainly temporary, whether on the scale of decades or centuries remains to be seen.
The biggest factor that threatens (promises?) to reverse this seemingly inevitable trend is the possibility of peak energy. Energy, upon which SO many of these trends depend–commercial globalization, most notably. What has happened in the last century is not the ineluctable consummation of something begun in ancient Mesopotamia, but the sugar rush of unlimited fossil fuels, and the ensuing optimization of society to that inexhaustible energy supply.
Before long (50 years? 100?), I think it likely we’re going to be optimizing to a very different reality. The Internet looks pretty smug there atop your hockey stick, but the galaxies and planets will be here long after Google is gone.
Hey Mark,
Thanks for feedback.
I didn’t get too deep into it in the post b/c it gets rather dense, but the complexity/compression thing is a theory of universal evolutionary development, and has been observed by thinkers from Albert Einstein to Buckminster Fuller to Carl Sagan. So, it’s not something that’s just happening with the internet…. it’s been happening with every evolutionary process throughout history.
some further reading on it can be found here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ephemeralization and here http://www.accelerationwatch.com/mest.html.
we probably will be optimizing a different reality soon (via a technological singularity?); who knows. i’m hoping that understanding things through these frameworks will give me some insights into what’s to come.
Thanks for the links–that gives me a much better sense of where you’re coming from. And as I said, I love these ideas. Perhaps where we differ is in our respective confidence level that they will give us, as you say, “insights into what’s to come.”
Hi Venessa
Thanks for another great post.
I have been trying to wrap my brain around complex adaptive systems in relation to how organizations should be designed in order to effectively embrace an utilize the acceleration of data, information and knowledge.
I’m working on my thesis right now, but seem to hit a wall. The wall is the notion of Adaptive capacity (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_capacity) as an answer to how organizations and individuals cope with change.
My problem is, that I find Adaptive capacity too vague, and in my opinion it’s more or less an attempt to explain why some org/humans adapt to change, but in a very blurry way.
We can talk about flat organizations, open innovation, freedom ect, but are these not just tools and not valid argumentation to why some organizations survive and innovate and why some don’t?
I hope my absorptive capacity is big enough for me to get to the bottom of this, but until then, I would love you and your thoughts on this one.
Well, look at the end of that wikipedia page:
Enhancing Natural Capacity:
learning to live with change and uncertainty;
nurturing diversity for resilience;
combining different types of knowledge for learning; and
creating opportunity for self-organization towards social-ecological sustainability.
I would argue that there are very few organizations (if any at all) that have reached adaptive capacity. There are so many ways we’re discovering how to engage in an informal learning process (i.e. via Twitter, online communities) and then bringing those ideas back to the organization to see where/how to apply it.
But how many people within each organization are engaging like that? Also, the structure of many organizations doesn’t encourage the flexibility/self-organization necessary for innovation or emergent results. Plus, we haven’t put together metrics that are comprehensive enough in order to really look at weaknesses and where to improve. I think we’ll see more of it though, performance metrics, social connectedness evaluations, and many other things looking at human & social capital.
So I think we still have a long way to go until we’re pushing the limits of adaptive capacity. If anything, I think we’re just exploring it.
More and more I’m feeling that understanding how social networks work, and how to leverage those processes is key to unlocking some enormous potential in this century.
Seems to me like adaptive capacity is inherently an uber-vague moving target – organisms and groups (where do you draw boundaries) evolve/develop new skills, but at the same time the competitive environment gets more complex with other increasingly capable agents/groups. It’s like expanding the mind-body problem to all systems… Imho, any scientific/quantitative definition of adaptive capacity needs to take into account the non-closed nature of living and non-living systems including the agent/system relationship. What we’re left with is arbitrary zoning/labelling of systems within systems – but realizing that we could throw some probability math at it and try to capture sufficient data to discover recurring patterns. Perhaps we’ll develop systems that we can use to develop the statistical likelihood % of nearing adaptive capacity at a given time in a given environment. (It’ll remain a probability until we achieve Total Systems Quantification, Computational Closure, or a close-enough state.)
Morten, you may find interesting this hobby framework for “intelligence” that I’ve chipped away at over the years: http://socialnode.blogspot.com/2009/10/control-over-perceived-environment-cope.html It takes into account the non-closed nature of systems. I visualize it as globes overlapping globes overlapping globes overlapping globes, in 4d of course. 5d+ if you consider multiple dimensions and the possibility of digitally taggin everything – like I said, no closure baby!
SavetheWorldfree.ning.com
is going to chang the world.
@Venessa
I agree that we have a long way to go and that more research is needed in order to make this area more tangible.
But before we have this research, are we then stuck?
I mean, look at the argumentation you also refer to.
Enhancing Natural Capacity:
learning to live with change and uncertainty;
nurturing diversity for resilience;
combining different types of knowledge for learning; and
creating opportunity for self-organization towards social-ecological sustainability.
Well, here the self-organization and partially the combining of knowledge are the only tangible and hands on approach that can implemented. I’m not saying that “learning to live with change and uncertainty and
nurturing diversity for resilience” are not valid, but they are simply to vague and have not been researched in depth. (please provide information if I’m mistaken)
My point is, that if companies decides to redesign their organization in order to fit the new ways of interacting, they will want more hard and better researched facts. Simply addressing and encouraging them to enhance Natural Capacity is to vague.
Absorptive capacity, Adaptive capacity and Natural capacity have been referenced by many researchers, but can we be satisfied with this?
Morten,
This area – “Enhancing Natural Capacity” – has been researched and explored quite a bit. Look for some articles on innovation, and you’ll see a lot of the same guidelines – fail often, fail fast, assemble dynamic teams, etc – all alluding to the notion that you have to be flexible and adaptable in times of change. One website that has a nice range of articles on this is Blogging Innovation (http://www.business-strategy-innovation.com/innovation-blog.html). Also check out Fast Company, Harvard Business Review, or even the Innovation section of Businessweek.
Another website that comes immediately to mind is http://www.cognitive-edge.com/, which was started by Dave Snowden (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Snowden), a pioneer in creating methods for Knowledge Management that can be applied to organizational complexity. I think you might really enjoy reading some of the things there.
Another source, coming from the design world, but essentially talking about the same thing, is the idea of ‘design thinking’, a term coined by Tim Brown of IDEO. Here’s a recent article that talks about the process. (http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/design_thinking_for_social_innovation). There are tons of articles lately though, because he just released a book (which you may also like to take a look at), called Change by Design, and he’s promoting design thinking all over the place.
And here’s a TED talk of him describing it (http://www.ted.com/talks/tim_brown_urges_designers_to_think_big.html)
Also look up some of the papers/case studies by Valdis Krebs, which is focused on Social Network Analysis. Here’s an intro by him. (http://www.orgnet.com/sna.html)
Please let me know if these sources are useful to you.
Venessa,
Thanks for the list, these are all great resources!
I have not read Tim Browns ‘design thinking’ as I have heard mixed reviews of it, but will give it a read. The other sites I visit regularly as they are mentioned often via the #scrm twitter tag, which is the absolute best resource 🙂
Will have to dive into Snowden as well. Have looked at the site before, but will move on to the literature for further information.
Thanks for the feedback
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I think we’ll start to see a clearer set of rules of etiquette develop online that people will agree to follow in order to get things done
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