Society 5.0 herald the coming of the ubiquity of technological systems in our environment. Those systems won’t be an option, as they will become one of the primary ways we will interact with our environment.

Designers, especially UX Designers, have made great strides in the past decade to create products that are increasingly more intuitive. Fierce competition made sure that products with clunky controls would be cast aside by paying customers. As this reality inches closer, we need to start addressing it.

The road ahead, however, will take far more from designers than better interfaces targeted toward a techno-savvy public. All types of designers will need to make their work far more accessible than ever before. UX Design (that’s user experience design to the uninitiated) will continue to grow as a field, even faster than before. Other areas of design, from system design to architectural design will need to pay attention to these new publics are design accordingly.

Society 5.0 is bringing advanced technological tools to the masses, trying to ease and better their lives. We are talking about self-driving vehicles, IoT-backed remote medical consultations at home, AI-assisted data analytics to feed you better tailored information and much more. Society 5.0 aims to address the plight of many oft-neglected segments of our population (such as the elderly or the handicapped) by giving new technology-driven opportunities to receive care and participate in all aspects of society.

What does accessibility mean?

Intuitive

Decades later we still make jokes about how complicated it was to set the time on a VCR. Designers of all stripes have learned since that nice, thick user manuals are thrown in remote drawers without being read and then instantly forgotten, or find a new life as door stoppers.

Today’s designs must be intuitive. Either people should understand instantly how to use the item, or the object itself should show the user how to operate it. This intuitive design becomes even more crucial than it is today as technology will permeate everyone’s life more than ever before.

Just think about self-driving cars. Yes, there will be training to use them and reading the manual will be important. But not everyone will take the time or have the leisure to do so. If there’s an emergency and you have to use a self-driving vehicle without proper training, hope that it can guide you through its safe operation.

Convivial

Intuitive design is one thing, but we still need people to want to use the tools made available to them.

Simplicity, speed, and rewarding experience is the only way to make sure whatever tool or service we create will actually be used. Creating a remote system to allow low-mobility elderly people to get medical checkups from home isn’t helping if they refuse to use it.

This also applies to people. Managers making themselves more accessible and open to frank discussions offer convivial access. Welcoming discussion groups who keep a positive attitude and avoid falling into toxicity are another example.

Physical access

When we talk about physical accessibility, we usually conjure up images of wheelchair ramps and text magnification. In Society 5.0, which aims to include as many people as possible, it will need to be much more than that.

Whether it is to allow disabled people to participate in the workforce easily or to offer proper health monitoring at home to the elderly, we will need IoT-connected cyber-physical systems. Those systems need to be designed and made available.

Think about chairs that read your bio-signs and systems that translate brain impulses into digital commands to controls computers, self-driving vehicles, phones, and automated kitchens. All of these systems are currently in existences as prototypes or proofs-of-concept, but the lack designs created for general consumption leave them as mere dreams for the future for many people who would live much better lives with them. For all his prestige, even Steven Hawkins did not have access to those.

Just think of all the difference advanced 3D-printed prosthesis made. While some models include highly sophisticated electronic packages and cost a small fortune, it is possible to download some simpler models from the Internet to create new arms for kids for a few hundred dollars.

We are also now talking about exoskeletons allowing people to carry heavy charges for extended periods of time. When will similar constructs enable paraplegic people to walk again? We are not far.

The rise of DIY bio-hacking, especially for cybernetic implants, show a new realm of possibilities. People are replacing glass eyes with cameras and sensors. Now how can we combine that AR to close the remaining gap between reality and cyberpunk novels? People implant magnets to gain a new sense to feel magnetic and electrical currents. How can this be improved to gain direct, touch-less control of tools and systems around us?

When you take those new innovations into consideration, physical accessibility takes a whole new sense.

Digital access

It’s not just people interacting with systems anymore. The Internet-of-Things (IoT) is on the rise: we are now living in a world where billions of devices are connected and talking to each other. That growth is not remotely done!

We are all aware of the rise of smart home gadgets, ranging from the useful to the pointless, and giving rise to creepy stories. In the medical field, 87% of organizations have adopted IoT systems for anything from remote monitoring to mechanized pills designed to deliver medication in specific parts of the body. There are examples like that in virtually every field.

Designing for both human and IoT connectivity is going to be a must. At the same time, simple connexions are not enough, and security must play a critical role (see Security, below).

Transparency

At its core, Transparency can mean availability of information.

I’m not advocating for total transparency of all information at all times (see Security below), but a lot of information is often restricted or inaccessible for no good reason.

I see four main barriers to transparency:

Power: There is power in controlling information. In many jobs, people use that control to justify their continued employment by turning themselves into gatekeepers. In some instances, people will restrict access to information strictly to create unnecessary power dynamics. We can find these information tyrants pretty much everywhere.

Bureaucratic process: From pretend security processes who make legitimate access to information difficult but do nothing to slow down criminal access, institutionalized lack of trust and ridiculously long chains-of-command, all the way to substantial bureaucratic processes that keep growing without ever being questioned, so much information would be freely available to you if you could just provide that damned permit A-38…

Lack of communication skills: Clear communication is a skill. As such, it isn’t innate but must be learned and can be improved throughout our entire lives. And yet it is something we neglect regularly.

The key to communication is to stop assuming the other person will understand what we are trying to communicate and try a bit of empathy. How can we make whatever information we communicate easier to access, simple to understand, clear in content and actually useful to the other party?

Fear: Humans are a fearful species. We tend to be paranoid for no reason, or the wrong reasons. Companies hide financial problems from employees for fear they will stop working. Bosses hide mistakes for fear that their subalterns will lose trust in them. Parents tell tall tales about the upstate farm where the dog has gone to avoid talking about death with their kids. When did this acts born of fear actually made any situation better? We don’t only delaying the inevitable, we actually make it worse.

We are also pretty good at inducing fear into other to shift their attention from what they really should be fearing. Want an example? Equifax, the large company that holds pretty much all your credit information, will frighten you with how you can reveal your information to bad people and try to sell you products to make that information more secure… all the while being themselves hacked through a mixture of negligence and stupidity, giving away all our information.

By creating transparency around information, we speed up processes, ease work, and avoid much guesswork that can lead to mistakes. Transparency reduces the senseless fears, and paranoid fantasy people have when they know you are hiding things from them.

Security

A critical part of the discussion on accessibility is the security around the information that you don’t want to share. Little things like personal information, passwords, confidential records, restricted access, you know, all those things that get hacked and stolen several times a week these days.

There are several challenges in front of the security experts:

• how to make systems generally more secure while staying easy to use?
• how to make sure sensitive information remain accessible when without being at risk of being stolen?
• how can smaller organizations protect themselves from well-funded, government-backed hackers?
• how to remove people as the weakest link in any security system?,
• how can private citizens protect themselves if big corporations that require their private information can’t keep it secure? (again, think of the Equifax leak as an example).

The security issue has large communities of experts already debating and exploring new avenues to improve security. As citizens, will the custodians of our private information get on board and listen to them, or just ignore the issue as it would imply additional expenses? We need to make to send a message with our wallets and aim to work only with those organizations who take all the necessary steps to protect us.

Designing for new publics

When high technology permeates everyone’s environment, whole swaths of the population who were often ignored or addressed in “future updates… probably” are now part of the core public.

Not only these people won’t be able to avoid those technological systems anymore, but many of them will have to be explicitly designed for them.

The physically impaired

Physical impairment encompasses a wide range of conditions.

We got motor issues, from a broken limb to quadriplegia, to neurodegenerative afflictions attacking coordination or causing tremors. We got sensory input issues, from color-blindness, partial or complete blindness, muteness, deafness, loss of sense of touch. There’s a lot more, but those can already get us thinking.

While we certainly can’t account for all impairment for all systems at all times, we still have the option of addressing the impairment itself and give the afflicted person better access to a much wider range of systems.

The mentally impaired

When I was younger, my grandmother took care of a group of people with intellectual disabilities. She had them start their own small business, creating crafted items to be sold in local stores to finance fun activities of their choice. The activities were nice, sure, but it was nothing compared to the pride they had every time they saw their items for sale in a real store. Like everyone else, it was vital for them to contribute to the world, to matter. Society 5.0 believes they just need the right tools to do so.

People with intellectual disability aren’t the only ones who could be considered “mentally impaired.” Several afflictions, many brain injuries or neurodegenerative conditions fall into this categories. Hell! Being drunk isn’t called being impaired for nothing! Still, all of them will need to move around, as well as to operate systems in their house and out in the world.

How do you design for people who have trouble with complex operations? Or people who can’t remember instructions after a minute or two? Or people who are unable to read?

The elderly

The elderly tend to be a bit of the two previous categories but in a different package.

More and more of our senior citizens are well enough used to technology by now. However, as age progress, even the tech-savvy ones can become confused or merely insecure about using unfamiliar systems.

Our society is aging and fast. Not only we had fewer children in the past five decades, but more people are living longer. A rapidly aging population was one of the main drivers behind Japan’s Society 5.0 reflexion, and the rest of the world isn’t that far behind. Elder care is going to be one of the most critical aspects of our society from now on.

Children

Our lovable little monsters are all too often treated like second-class citizens. We either design specifically for them, or we assume their parents will take care of things for them.

However, as technology will spread to all aspects of our living environment, kids are going to interact with those new systems continually. Kids can be rough with electronics, inquisitive with new systems and love to learn to do things by themselves (well, when they want to). My own daughter can’t read yet, and when she uses a child-restricted tablet designed for especially for young kids, she will still find her way to eBay or fiddle with the tablet’s settings. Every. Single. Time.

Kids play outside, visit shopping malls, use washrooms. They do a lot of the same things adult do and should be able to use many of the same systems too. They can’t only have their own versions, as duplicating systems everywhere would soon be cost-prohibitive.

Animals

We have a lot of pets and, in an automated world, some systems will have to be designed for their needs too. Even wild animals, such as raccoons and coyotes, are now getting used to life in urbanized areas. Better tracking and control of their movements will allow us to design our cities better to accommodate these new “citizens” that, whether we like it or not, are here to stay.

As research demonstrates that animals are more complex and intelligent than we first thought, as a society, we will need to recognize their needs better and cater for their recreational needs.

Robots and other cyber-physical systems

Finally, all of our new robots, toys, and tools have some needs that must be fulfilled if we want them to serve us properly.

Machines have a variety of need as significant as ours, larger even if we consider that they require more maintenance and an increasingly large number of them will require to be connected to other systems.

We tend to design those machines themselves, but not their environments. Autonomous mobile robots are still a curiosity, apart from the odd exception (like those robotic vacuum cleaners), but this will change faster than we think. Fully human-like androids are still far in the future, meaning that between now and then we need to design for somewhat mobile, somewhat autonomous, somewhat intelligent machines.

Get involved in the discussion

Society 5.0, while making a lot of exciting promises, involves quite a lot of challenges that are all too often glossed over. Accessibility and all of what that means for the design industry is but one of those challenges.

The best designers of tomorrow are those who will start exploring these new challenges today. We are at the dawn of an era of new possibilities.

At Hivernité, a Montreal’s think tank with a focus on reinventing our world for the era of Society 5.0, these discussions involving the experts of the field, both veteran and new, are quite important. If you are interested in participating, I invite you to keep an eye on our website to see when and how you can contribute.

Maurice Lefebvre

I am a futurist, system thinker and organizational transformation expert, dedicated to easing our transition into Society 5.0. I am available as a speaker through the think tank Hivernité (www.hivernite.ca) as well as a trainer and organizational coach through Moabi Formations (www.moabiformation.com).

www.hivernite.ca

This post is a follow-up to “How to turn Purpose and Meaning into happiness”. If you haven’t yet, go check it out!

Meaning is an essential part of our lives. We can’t stay sane without it.

And yet, these days we tend to drown ourselves in noise rather than looking at the dearth of meaning that surrounds us. We are surrounded by meaningless work, done for meaningless organizations, and listening to politicians who’s discourse is utterly devoid of meaning. As our existence seems all too often to be meaningless, we drown ourselves in meaningless entertainment, meaningless escapes. 

“But Maurice,” I was recently told, “I have a family to feed with my meaningless work. I have no time left to find your stupid meaning, and even if I did, I’m too bummed out to do it.” Yes, yes, that’s my point exactly. 

Human beings are social creatures. We first organized in tight tribes where everyone has a part to play for the survival and prosperity of the group. Being an active, productive and meaningful part of a group is an essential part of what makes us human. 

This social organization allowed to prosper beyond what most animals can achieve. It also gave us free time to explore our world, discover new techniques, and imagine ways to apply them to push back the upper limit of our tribal organization. 

As our societies became larger, individuals lost their impact on the big picture. We created processes to run our sizeable social organization, and we elected ourselves as those processes’ servants, to maintain them and make sure they stayed on track. Because of that scale, our leaders became so removed from people’s lives that they ended up seeing humans as resources and created more processes to manage them. See where I’m going? 

In the post “Why is changing a company so difficult?”, I explain organizations, such as companies or societies, are complex distributed systems. When there’s a power imbalance in favor of the central system (the brain, who favor high-level information) over the local systems (the appendages, who gather and analyze tons of minute local data), a lot of speed of reaction, initiative, and useful information is lost. This means that when you have a boss who says what to do and executants who have to shut up and obey orders, information is lost, and the expertise of people is wasted. To keep the body analogy, think of a brain who decide to shut off all of the body’s sense because he’s the one in charge. 

This brings us to another issue that has been reinforcing the problem: we have gotten used to sell our time to an employer, rather than to sell the value of our output. Essentially, we have accepted indentured servitude in exchange for a paycheck. Liberating ourselves from the 9 to 5 grind isn’t easy. After all, we all need to eat, pay the bills and support our families. Finding understanding within the organizations that employ us isn’t easy either, merely because they “paid good money” for your time. 

This isn’t a simple or easy problem to solve. 

There are a few ways to make it easier to turn our Purpose into tangible Meaning. 

Find a job that aligns with your Purpose. 

Having a job which Purpose align precisely with yours is by far the simplest way to reach Purpose/Meaning alignment as your workdays are dedicated to your Purpose.

Many people have to make do with a full-time job to makes ends meet. They look for Work/Life Balance, or work that will leave you enough time to live and that is ready to make a concession for your life’s responsibilities (like a bit of remote work for when the kids need to stay home). Work/Life balance however, is a fallacy. We have one life, not two. The idea that we need to suffer for part of it only to make the other bearable and that the secret is finding the right balance is ridiculous. It’s like arguing that torture is good because it will just make you appreciate more all those times where you aren’t being tortured! When work is necessary, we shouldn’t suffer through it, period! Take on jobs that align with your Purpose.

Finding such a job, however, is far easier said than done. Few workplaces put any thought at all about creating meaningful jobs (other than for marketing purposes). Finding one where you will be able to apply your Purpose meaningfully is mostly a matter of luck. 

This situation might seem only natural at first. I’ve heard many company owners say that their employees’ happiness or fulfillment is none of their concern. This show a lack of perspective: happy, fulfilled employees are shown to be more engaged, more productive, more loyal and an overall much better value for an employer. Arguing that they are paid to be engaged, as productive as possible, loyal to a fault and the best value possible at all time no matter how they are treated is delusional at best. You get what you give. 

An increasing number of companies do realize their own interest in providing meaningful employment and treating people with respect. They don’t necessarily do it for the goodness of their hart either (although some do): the benefits are measurable and tangible. We can argue all day about the importance of doing it for the right reasons, but societal change takes time, and I’ll take any improvement I can get. 

If you want to create a meaningful job for your organization, merely ask yourself: how does this job have a positive impact on the world. If it does, then make sure to specify it in the job posting to get applicants who will be motivated by that impact. If it doesn’t, then it’s not meaningful. If you can’t find meaning in the jobs you need to be done, maybe it’s time to ask yourself what is the purpose and meaning of your company. 

Stop selling your time. Sell the value you produce instead, and make that value a product of your Purpose. 

This is a path favored by self-employed people, even if I believe that this should be the way we all should earn our income. 

An excellent first step is starting to see ourselves as an independent product or service providers. It means that you need to offer something of value, such as expertise, rather than just selling your time. Even if you are not an expert this can work: I know several teens who get their first proper job on nothing else than being reliable or diligent. 

This attitude can help you better understand your own value and better position yourself by knowing what differentiator you bring to the conversation. Model your offer (and resume) around that value your offer. Keep in mind that this value will evolve or change with time. The critical thing to remember is that this value needs to be tied to your Purpose or, if you haven’t found it yet, to the path where you think your Purpose will lie.

When you have determined the value you offer, don’t compromise it. See any employer as a client, not an owner. Choose your clients carefully, as their actions and stances will reflect on you. 

Always ask yourself how you can turn your offer into something that will not tie you to a 9 to 5 job, how to compress the value you deliver. For some, it will be evident, and they will embrace the self-employed (or entrepreneur) life from the get-go. For others, it will require a bit more exploration. 

The whole idea is to take control of the value you deliver, and earn your income in a way that will increase the dedication to your Meaning rather than diminishing it. 

This is the path I’ve chosen for myself. I’m a practical researcher of sorts. I test new organizational ideas by using my own companies (I risk my own money first), and then turn that experience into training and coaching for other companies who want to try those approaches. This allows me to earn a living while billing clients only a few days every month, dedicating the remainder of my time to my purpose: how to help people, organizations and institutions evolve their outlooks and dynamics to prosper and find Meaning during the changes brought by our new industrial and social revolutions.

Learn to live with less and use your free time for Meaningful purposes. 

I feel this one is a bit of a cop-out. It requires little change from what you currently are doing, but it does need from you to make sacrifices. 

The idea of living with fewer wants in order to need less and have more time to dedicate to your meaning is kinda cool… when it’s actually a choice made possible by having few commitments and responsibilities. It’s a great path when you are 20 something and unattached. This, however, isn’t the case for the rest of us. 

For some, it isn’t really about choice. Many will always opt to take care for family members who need its: a sick person, children or an elderly relative. It’s a calling, not really a choice. They know that sacrifice will be part of the game, but some things are more important than any sacrifice they’ll have to make. As a society, it is a shame that we don’t give more consideration and support for this kind of dedication. 

There is no easy answer here. As a society, we need to ask ourselves why do we need to work that much to avoid abject poverty, and how can we change that. When we find those solutions, even if they are not perfect, we will give solid, decent options both for people reducing their work time to search for Meaning, and for those who have found it and are now required to free their time. 

Remove the need for an income and dedicate yourself to your Purpose. 

This is the easiest way to achieve Purpose/meaning alignment. Just become rich and do whatever you want. Simple enough, right? 

Jokes aside, this is not entirely out of the realm of the possible. Building passive income streams, with mostly automated and/or delegated effort, is doable after you took the time to create them in the first place. It still not a reasonable path for most. 

For those who can consider it, try to align your Purpose with your passive income generation. It will take time, and end up as a mixture all the approaches listed above. For example, turning your Purpose into a communicable experience and then write books or creating online classes about it will allow you to pursue your Meaning while gradually increase passive income. 

I wish I’d have more advice about this path, but I still need to explore it myself. There’s a lot of literature for that out there, usually written by people who haven’t made it yet so, you know, grain of salt and all that. 

New models are needed

All of the paths I mentioned here are little more than duct-taped solutions to allow us to look for Meaning in a society that uses models that don’t see the need for it.

I harbor no illusion on that, but it doesn’t mean I have to accept it. Someone needs to come up with a better plan.

Hivernité, one of my companies, has a workgroup dedicated to coming up with new organizational models that will offer alternatives to paying for people’s time, have built-in approaches on creating meaningful positions, betting on employees growth as an investment, and getting rid of bullshit jobs and shit jobs alike. 

But we can’t do it alone. Everyone of us needs to start the discussion and make sure it doesn’t die before we have forged a better path. The is tangible value to finding one’s Meaning, regardless if we’re talking about a person, an organization or an institution. 

If you want to get involved in the discussion, if you are looking at how to bring meaning to your organization or if you just want to spread those ideas, don’t hesitate to get in touch.

Maurice Lefebvre

I am a futurist, system thinker and organizational transformation expert, dedicated to easing our transition into Society 5.0. I am available as a speaker through the think tank Hivernité (www.hivernite.ca) as well as a trainer and organizational coach through Moabi Formations (www.moabiformation.com).

www.hivernite.ca

As human beings, in our current society, we tend to be a little lost.

Our world can be a bit dreadful, between running it into an ecological wall, treating workers as indentured servants, putting hateful liars in charge and looking at a bleak future.

It is no surprise that the QUEST FOR HAPPINESS is such a big business at the moment. Happiness is this fantastic stuff! Happiness is those amazing experiences! Happiness is within you, and I’ll show you how to reach it in my new book/course/seminar now on sale…!

This isn’t going a blog post where you’ll have to read a long, mostly pointless generic rambling tempting you with revealing the secret to happiness at the end, which turns out to be in your heart all along. Instead, I’ll start by giving you the “secret” right away:

Happiness is a byproduct of knowing one’s Purpose and applying it in a tangible way providing Meaning to one’s life. That’s it. 

Happiness is not a superior, mostly permanent state of being. It’s an emotion. It is fleeting, like all other intense emotion, because no one can hold any kind of fierce passion for very long. It would be exhausting and pointless. 

Happiness, and it’s less intense cousin contentment, are naturally occurring when we have a well-enough defined Purpose and Meaning. Knowing who we are, why we are here, and the impact we have on the world is crucial for a human. 

Why are Purpose and Meaning important to us?

My dog is happy every time I get home. Why? Because a dog is a social animal who needs its pack to socialize and feel secure. 

We humans aren’t that different. A bit more complex maybe. We are also social animals, but since we have constructed a society for ourselves, we feel the need the know our place in it. That’s our Purpose. 

We also have a deep need, so deep that it’s quite possibly genetic, to have an impact on the world around us. You can see it in babies: no baby is happier (not merely content, but deeply happy) than one who has willingly done something that has a visible impact on its environment. It could be as simple as pushing a toy and make it fall. If the movement can be repeated with a similar result, look at the expression of pure, unadulterated joy on the face of the baby. They have a “pleasure at being the cause.” Over a century ago, German psychologist Karl Groos linked that trait with our passion for games, little make-believe worlds where we can have a significant impact without real consequences. Our ability in impacting the world around us makes us real. That is the power of our individual existence, our Meaning. 

Finding your Purpose

“Why are we here?” An important philosophical question, and one loved by stoners everywhere. It is also the wrong question. Why are we here as a species? No reason. We are a transient life-form evolved from an earlier one and slowly evolving into something else. There is no Purpose for us as a species. We just happen to be here, now. 

“Why am I here?” is far more appropriate a question. Humans, as a species, is good at creating structures. Those structures allow us to build social groups far larger than the 150 people or so we are individually able to maintain meaningful relationships with. Grouped together, these structures are called “society,” and an individual role within it has always been important. Our Purpose is our contribution to society. We must have a role to play, a use, a function, within this “society,” or be branded a parasite and shunned.

Historically a much wider range of occupations was considered purposeful, from artisan to artist, from warriors to clergy, from child-rearer to wise old person. Even vagabonds could have Purpose, from bringing news from afar and temporary workforce where and when needed to social observation and espionage. 

These days, Purpose has mostly been redefined from “contributing to society” to “contributing to someone’s wealth and power.” Where once our role within society and often the main source of income was an easy access to a Purpose, for most people it has stopped playing the same role. There is no easy access to Purpose anymore, as we have stopped serving society itself as a form of employment. We serve companies, bureaucracies, or the interests of powerful individuals, all constructs rather than our fellow men.

Nowadays we find remarkable when people actually find their Purpose. It makes us dream. “How lucky they are,” we say. But anyone can find a purpose for oneself. Everyone should try to do so. 

My colleague Olivier Fortier has recently written two excellent articles on the subject of finding one’s Purpose (Part 1 and Part 2). The gist is that a Purpose is not about you but about others, it’s a calling that’s greater than you, and that you can find it at any age. 

Purpose is about others and is greater than us. This makes sense since it takes its origin in our function within society, all the way from the role we played in helping our hunter-gatherer tribe survive. The Purpose is our service to others, to the tribe, to our society. 

My own quest with Purpose started early when I was still in high school. I found out that I was happy when I helped friends shine. For most of my life, it was a small pleasure of mine: helping someone find their path, opening a new opportunity, giving a chance to someone who needs it, making someone realize their own potential and go for it. I called that unlocking people. Few things were more satisfying for me than that, so when a reached my point of no return with my career, I decided to turn that Purpose into my new career. Now a few years later, that Purpose has continued to grow and refine itself through practice, and I now set my eyes on a more significant challenge: unlocking societies. This isn’t an uncommon path for Purpose: it starts small, you realize how important it is for you and how it defines you, and you see it evolve over time. Some people have their Purpose clear as day from a young age. Others will only find it late in life.

Purpose is an essential ingredient for the happiness formula. As social creatures, we can’t really stand being useless, worthless. We need to belong, we need to be useful, we need a Purpose. 

Now, understand me well: If you merely find your Purpose then do nothing about it, it’s not happiness you will find. It’s misery. 

There is nothing worse than finally understanding who we are and letting that revelation and all that potential going to waste. You need to turn that Purpose into action, into something tangible. Only then can we find the second part of the happiness formula: Meaning. 

Creating Meaning

If Purpose is the answer to the question “Why am I here?”, then Meaning is the answer to “How can I matter?”. 

Meaning is how you let your mark on the world. It doesn’t have to be big, but it has to be there. It makes sure your life, well, meant something. We can find Meaning in several ways, but the practical application of our Purpose is a solid one.

Nowadays we, as a society, accepted a redefinition of accepted roles that really isn’t to our advantage. We define ourselves in large part by our jobs, which is similar enough to what it was before as to remain familiar, but change the “contribution to society” part by “increasing the wealth and prestige of someone else.” We exchanged the satisfaction of trading the product of our efforts and excellence to trading our time, basically selling ourselves as indentured servants! Our expertise and our output aren’t important anymore, but that our employers own us for the time they paid for is. This explains the rise of bullshit jobs, as brilliantly decried by David Graeber In his book “Bullshit jobs,” where people are stuck doing busywork utterly devoid of any value just because they have been bought for a certain amount of time. The Purpose in these jobs is empty, prevent us from creating Meaning for ourselves. 

Purpose without a way to apply it and use it to make a difference in the world around us leads to frustration and despair. Being aware of our calling while being stuck in a purposeless occupation or, if we’re luckier, a useful profession that merely doesn’t align with our Purpose, is nothing short of soul-grinding. The remedy is to apply our Purpose to something Meaningful. 

Making the switch toward a life of Meaning aligned with our Purpose isn’t always an easy one. This is especially true if your Purpose is about something that our current society doesn’t attach much value to. Helping the homeless isn’t known as a reliable path to a stable income. It doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t do it, it just means that you will need to find compromises with your time to help them while avoiding their predicament for yourself.

I have written a companion piece to this post discussing various ways to reclaiming enough time to dedicate to applying our Purpose and create Meaning. 

We can find Meaning in other ways than relying on our Purpose. Having children is one. Whether it’s your Purpose of not, any parent worth its salt will find Meaning in raising a child. It’s important. Children need you for survival, guidance, and care, both physical and emotional. But unless Purpose and Meaning are aligned, no source of Meaning will consistently deliver happiness. 

Meaning can be selfish (“But it means something to me”), but it’s actually much easier to find when it’s altruistic. Having other people recognize your meaning in the world is a fantastic feeling of accomplishment. 

Better humans for a better future

The QUEST FOR HAPPINESS starts making more sense at a society level when we realize that its components are not about ourselves, but about others. 

If you want to make the world a better place, the secret is by finding happiness, not for ourselves, but by becoming better versions of ourselves and improving the lives of our tribe and of society as a whole. In turn, doing just that will make that feeling of happiness a lasting one. 

Remember: Purpose + Meaning = Happiness, and a better society to boot. 

Like this piece? There’s a companion to it looking at ways to reclaim time to devote to turning our Purpose into Meaning. Go check it out!

Maurice Lefebvre

I am a futurist, system thinker and organizational transformation expert, dedicated to easing our transition into Society 5.0. I am available as a speaker through the think tank Hivernité (www.hivernite.ca) as well as a trainer and organizational coach through Moabi Formations (www.moabiformation.com).

www.hivernite.ca

As Society 5.0 is on the horizon, a fresh batch of upheavals will strike most organizations as emerging technologies, market dynamics and people’s relationship with work will change. 

This means that, yet again, organizations will have to face Change. It means a lot of power plays will happen, a lot of money will be spent (and often wasted), a lot of people will be stressed and a lot of company will fail their changes in a way that will cost them far more than just money. 

Just talk about Change in your organization and you’ll see the fear in the look of the people around you. “Not AGAIN.” 

We see Change as something big, put in motion as events. Each requires solid change management skills to build a strong strategy, communicate it appropriately, deliver the plan, manage expectations and manage for resistance to change. All of these things are difficult and the bigger the changes, the more difficult they are. 

Big changes will always be stressful. It will be difficult for humans who have evolved stress to improve their survivability during unexpected and uncertain events. It will be difficult for organizations built like machines: precise, ordered and predictable. The more you add stress, the more the resistance and the higher the chances something breaks. 

So how to approach those big Change events to execute them successfully? 

Don’t. 

Lean experts have been advocating for creating a culture of continuous improvement, of constant small changes. This is great, as it creates a culture of constant dynamism. For people, those changes are not violent, events or big enough to put them in danger. For organizations, it requires a reorganization into a living, dynamic structure, much closer to a natural ecosystem. 

But that the theory. “In the real world, it doesn’t work like that Maurice.” Big changes often end up not working or paying off as intended. Companies either aren’t Lean or have adopted parts of a Lean model. Old habits die hard, and they still manage their changes from a central authority. I have met my fair share of Lean change experts who will spend months analyzing change impacts, devising change management plans and creating communication plans for the rollout of those changes. Or of companies that ask for continuous improvements and innovation, and yet stifle any attempts of locally modifying behaviors and dynamics that haven’t been decided/designed/approved by a central authority. Where’s the Lean in that? 

Just asking for companies to allow their divisions, like teams, to innovate without interference, or even better with their full support, is wishful thinking. Why? Because until those companies changes, anyone initiating those changes will be at risk and will face resistance. In Jack: Straight from the Gut, Jack Welch describes his attempts at bringing change to General Electric, as a CEO, akin to starting a war and throwing grenades. If it’s that difficult when you are in charge, imagine when you are just a cog in the machine. 

Sure, teams can achieve a limited form of continuous improvement. As long as it doesn’t rattle the rest of the organization, it can work well. But it is limited. It can be so much more than that. And if we want to evolve a company to adapt to the emerging world of Industry 4.0 and Society 5.0, it’s a situation we need to address. 

To understand the underlying problem bringing changes in companies, one that becomes clear when we use a bit of system theory and learn how complex systems work. 

Explaining the problem

We’re going to do a bit of theory now, so please bear with me. 

One standard model of complex systems is the hierarchical model, where specialized systems of varying complexities nested within one another. Like companies. 

One of the most frequent problems with hierarchical systems is that the healthy dynamics between the hierarchical levels becomes skewed. 

Hierarchies evolve from bottom to top, from the lowest level to the highest, from the cell to the whole organism. The lower you go in a hierarchy, the faster the evolution rate. Those lower levels are the front line of the complex hierarchical system and as such have to respond a lot more precise and specialized stimuli.

The highest-level system, like the brain or the board of directors, still has a critical role to play: it must give a general direction, a purpose, to this evolution. Without it, lower systems will evolve fast in often unpredictable, and undesirable, directions. Like cancer. The higher-level system parses vast quantities of information coming from all the sub-systems, but that information is more straightforward, higher-level, already digested into something less complicated. 

Both high-level and low-level systems have their precise roles. The common mistake is to give too much power to one or the other. 

In a company, the most common issue is too much power taken by upper management. They know where they want to company to go and request departments and teams to execute their plans to get there. But that kind of centralized power comes at the loss of most of the information that should be gathered and processed by the teams. The team’s focus becomes execution rather than intelligence and adaptation. Information only trickles up within the system rather than flow and is usually ignored until it can’t be anymore. Innovation is stifled, hurting the capacity of the entire organization to adapt to change. 

On the other hand, not enough guidance form the upper management and the various teams will only react to their own, immediate situation. This will cause a significant loss of cohesion and productivity across the entire company. We don’t see this situation as often as too much control from management, as it requires a decentralized, self-organizing model, like Holacracy, which is still rare. 

The principle remains similar for governments. Too much control at the top and you create a totalitarian regime, replacing natural adaptability, innovation, and evolution by whatever is deemed the priority of the moment by the government. Too little regulations and you get tax avoidance (which prevent the delivery of shared services), monopolies concentrating common resources (such as money) in few hands, crime and other similar system-related problems. More often than not, governments strive for a balance but end up with too much and too little at once: constraints who end up benefitting large conglomerate while killing small businesses, help for specific slices of the population that ends up trapping them in a situation where they need that help, over or under-reacting to a challenge because they focus on the wrong reasons (such as an upcoming election), etc. This situation is a result of addressing symptoms without understanding the underlying system. 

Fixing the imbalance

If we fix that power imbalance, not with a single patchwork but with a change of internal dynamics to align how the company works with how a complex hierarchical system works, then we can hope of creating an organization that is a dynamic system under constant evolution and improvement. 

My favorite model to remedy to this power balance is based on an approach described by Dave Gray in his book The Connected Company. He calls it podularity. It is a model, not a framework or a complete, complex solution. To make it work for you, you need to fiddle with it a bit, you need to keep communications going, and you need to keep it alive and evolving. For organizations that adopt a Lean mindset, this is right up their alley. 

In this model, management establishes goals, constraints, and resources into sandboxes. Teams are wholly self-organizing but attached to a sandbox. Teams get their resources from the sandbox but must contribute information and effort toward the goal as well as respecting the constraints. The system is very alive as the sandboxes will evolve, with their resources and constraints adjusted based on the information contributed by all the teams attached, while still aiming for the goal determined by management. Teams who don’t follow the rules of their sandbox can’t draw resources from it and will need to attach to a more appropriate sandbox or starve and be eliminated by the system. The beauty of this model is that it is self-correcting and the power distribution between higher and lower systems stays in balance through the sandbox. It makes for a very organic model and can be scaled to apply to a government level.

One of the strengths of the model is that it is possible the to progressively introduce it within an organization. Start with the groups that are ready and willing. Make sure their sandbox includes everything both they and you need to give them their independence. Then let them deliver results and improve the system. Make sure their successes and challenges are well communicated across the organization, so other groups can open their minds to it and start thinking how it can work for them. 

I often talk about decentralized organizations. Well, this is it. 

Just like adequately working complex hierarchical systems, the higher systems set high-level goals and constraints. Lower-level systems must work within these guidelines but can evolve fast to adapt to their changing environment. They can also influence the guidelines to make sure they are kept relevant. The entire complex system will slowly adjust and evolve as a result of all the small local changes, slowly modifying the dynamic of the whole organization. The entire dynamic feel more natural, reducing stress across the whole system as the scale of actions, decisions, and consequences is vastly reduced. Autonomy and reduced scale allow for experimentations, leading to innovation and adaptability. 

It does require a will for the central authority to let go of its power and redefine its role. This kind of transformation starts with the top, not as a big change management plan, but rather as a will to let go. The hardest changes in the culture of an organization rarely come from the team, but instead, it comes from the organization’s leaders. A desire for change and a willingness to do what it takes are two very different things. 

If you want to know more

While using this model isn’t overly complicated or difficult, it helps to know what you are doing. 

I recommend reading Dave Gray’s The connected Company. Not only is the decentralized model outline there, but the whole book is a fascinating read, showing us clearly why companies need to evolve their habits, as the old ways won’t work anymore. 

I’m involved with two companies that can advise and support you if you are interested in evolving your organization toward such a model. 

Octant organizes seminars and retreats, both privates and open to the public. Decentralized model is a subject we often cover. 

If you want to adopt this model and require training or coaching for your organization, get in touch and I’ll hook you up.

Maurice Lefebvre

I am a futurist, system thinker and organizational transformation expert, dedicated to easing our transition into Society 5.0. I am available as a speaker through the think tank Hivernité (www.hivernite.ca) as well as a trainer and organizational coach through Moabi Formations (www.moabiformation.com).

www.hivernite.ca

We are now at the dawn of the fifth stage of human society. This is a big deal. 

Like all society stage before it, this one is driven by the emergence of game-changing technologies from the fourth industrial revolution. This time its significant advances in biotech, in artificial intelligence, in quantum computing, in cloud and fog computing, the Internet-of-Things, cyber-physical systems, and nanotech. We are moving from technologies we use a tool to control our environment, toward technology as our environment. 

We are talking about a revolution . More than slow progress, we re seeing a cascade of innovations and significant breakthroughs in science and techs. It means a shift powerful enough it profoundly affect all facets of our society. It means about half the job types of today will be replaced by occupations that don’t even exist yet. It means that interfacing human and machines will become commonplace (for medical, augmentation or control reasons). Biotech breakthrough is accelerating, helping us transcend our limits and gain the upper hand of some serious illnesses.

In 2016, Japan has proposed an initiative dubbed Society 5.0 to purposely redesign many elements of their society using the advances of the fourth industrial revolution in order to serve its people better. 

This is something important. 

Most governments content themselves to react to current problems by offering immediate band-aid solutions to appease their constituents. When a government prefers to artificially sustain a company that has no hope of being competitive and turning a profit ever again to “save jobs”, or when a government issues powerful restrictive measures because it doesn’t really know how to deal with emerging technology, it doesn’t prepare its society for the future. Instead of addressing the real issue and building for the future, and It only creates an illusion of a solution, an illusion of safety. That company will have to close someday, and its employees won’t be better off then. Or those regulations will be worked around in no time by the honest proponents of the emerging technology (the less-than-honest won’t even wait that long). 

What Japan is doing is facing what’s coming, and trying to incorporate those changes in their society in a positive way. They are doing it proactively and are working with the creators of those technological advances as well as with futurists to design a better future. Regulations will happen, but to shape rather than block. The approach isn’t perfect yet (as cryptocurrency proponents will attest), but the will is there. 

It’s about people

Back in 2011 in Germany a workgroup proposed a plan named Industry 4.0 to address how the manufacturing industry could harness new technologies. The discussions around Industry 4.0 have evolved and spread far beyond Germany since then, helping the transition toward “smart factories” and better value-chain worldwide. 

Society 5.0 is built along the same lines: part high-level plan and guidelines, part workspace for discussions. The idea is to find how we can use technology to better the welfare of people and the environment they live in (both living and working environments, as well as THE environment). 

With a rapidly aging population, depleting workforce, loss of quality of life, energy and resource sustainability issues, as well as transportation challenges, these concern are very close to home for the Japanese society. Elsewhere some of those issues are less pressing, but not by much, and we still need to address them. 

One of the key element is to integrate technology with our environment better so it becomes seamless. Not only this will help remove barriers for large sections of the population (not everyone is tech-savvy), but by making technology more or less invisible, it stops being about the tech itself and can become more about its beneficiaries. 

Technology is meant to improve on our abilities and free us from repetitive and lower-value work, to allow us to take care of more important things. It was always the goal, and it has been a reality for entire classes of people. But that technology is imperfect and require plenty of humans to maintain it, analyze its output, and generally create value from it. Now we have reached a point where technology can take care of most of that work for us. 

We are not done talking about Society 5.0

The Japanese plan for Society 5.0 gives us an exciting view of how technology can affect our lives for the better in fields such as mobility, healthcare, food, agriculture, manufacturing, energy and disaster prevention. However, it is incomplete as it doesn’t cover employment or concepts such as personal meaning in the new society. I don’t believe it to be an oversight, but rather a space left open for discussion and the initiation of new ideas. 

What we need to make sure of, as a society, is that we don’t become irrelevant in the face of that technology. In the long run, we won’t be as we will find new areas where we will excel above machines. But it the short term whole swats of the population are in danger of being caught unprepared by those changes. It happened before, with each industrial revolution. We need to figure out now what we should do to help people find relevance, prosperity and meaning during the changes, rather than loss and despair. 

The need for a meaningful existence isn’t just for people who will risk being left behind in this new world, but also for the who will benefit from it the most. Just think about it: let’s say new technology removes the need for you to work, take care of most chores and add 30 years of productivity to your life. Just like a new retiree, you start by enjoying that freedom like a vacation. However, before long comes the big question: “What now?”. 

We, humans, need meaning. We talk about happiness a lot, but meaning is far more critical to our well-being and will bring enough happiness for us to be content. Traditionally what we do for a living has given us some meaning, family has provided another part, community another and religion too. The more of these elements you remove, the more depression, feeling of emptiness and solitude emerge. However, as our society changes, we need to either redefine and re-acquired those elements providing meaning, AND find brand new ones to replace those we move away from. Hobbies, travels, money and new experiences can be enriching, but they are not meaning, they are not our “WHY”. 

As part of the Society 5.0 discussion, we need to address the subject of meaning and how it can evolve. We need to explore new paths for it, paths that will capitalize on our modern technological paradigm. There is still a place for people to move our world forward, discover new things and make life better. This opportunity is not reserved for an elite few: the world of Society 5.0 increasingly provides more of us with the possibility to engage and become a positive force in our immediate environment, or the whole world. 

Being part of the discussion

Most discussions about Industry 4.0 have only involved business and industry professional, but Society 5.0 is entirely different in its nature and should include the voice of futurists, philosophers, historians, tech professionals, social professionals, blue-collar workers, white-collar workers, no-collar workers, entrepreneurs and, well, pretty much everyone. It makes sense since we are all going to be affected. 

The questions are deceptively simple: “Looking at what’s coming, where do we want to go as a society?”, “How do we find meaning when what we know is replaced by something new?”, “How can we leverage our new technological paradigm to create a better world for all?”, “How can we prepare and help others prepare?”. 

In 2017, to find answers to those questions, I founded Hivernité: a small, think tank dedicated to finding ways to help our society become aware, to evolve and adapt to Society 5.0. It is still in its early days, but it has spawned a small ecosystem of projects aimed at educating people and opening their minds to new possibilities. We are discussing meaning, rethinking the workplace, system thinking & ecosystem design, developing human potential and more. It has been a demanding, rocky, but ultimately one of the most satisfying year of my life. I have found my “why”. 

You don’t need a think tank to participate in the discussion. Just look around you. What things (work, services, opportunities) might disappear and how can you help replace them by something more adapted to the realities of tomorrow? You don’t even need to know the answers just yet. Start the discussion, and you will be surprised by the potential for positive change that will emerge.

Maurice Lefebvre

I am a futurist, system thinker and organizational transformation expert, dedicated to easing our transition into Society 5.0. I am available as a speaker through the think tank Hivernité (www.hivernite.ca) as well as a trainer and organizational coach through Moabi Formations (www.moabiformation.com).

www.hivernite.ca

You’ve read a whole lot of books on the subject. You devoured a bunch of blog post too.

You know it is now time for an organizational change in your organization. You’re ready and willing. You’re pumped!

So… how do you proceed?

Change is a difficult subject to tackle, especially since people are a bit (okay, a LOT) weary about change. With good reasons too.

It’s hard for a company to reinvent its architecture. It’s even harder to implement a new one. The endeavor will face the full brunt of the organization’s immune system, competing personal agendas, danger from unexpected context changes, and the mighty power of truly apathetic people. Fun times.

Here are three strategies for change management. Each has their specific uses and knowing which one will save you lots of pain.

Big Top-Down Change

This strategy is a popular one. Not because it’s the best, not because it’s the safest and not because it’s the least traumatizing one. No, it’s the most popular because:

• It can be managed just like a project, with big planning committees, lots of predictive planning, and good excuses to scrap the whole thing when it goes awry.
• Many consulting firms prefer to work this way: big endeavor means you’ll need more help, and thus more revenues for the firm.
• It’s a great way to focus attention. It can be on yourself. It can be away from something else. If your company is large enough, it can even be newsworthy! Perfect to hide something.
• It keeps you in control.

This doesn’t mean that it can’t be the most appropriate form of change in many situations. It’s just that the bigger you go, the riskier it gets. If you want to go that route, then make sure you do it for the right reasons.

Use this strategy when:

When an organization needs to implement something across the board and do so in a specific manner, a Big Top-down change might be the way to go. Ex: A new governmental constraint for example or a new company initiative.

When the organization needs to do a major pivot quickly, this strategy may be appropriate. Pivots will cover changes in vision, or organization and maybe even the very nature of the work being done. In theses cases, there might now be a better way to implement the change. Mind the risks, however.

Avoid this strategy when:

Avoid this strategy if you can use another. Big top-down change seems safer because a lot of Very Intelligent People talked and planned and produced solid documents. They still often fail because the employees (and even people in upper management) don’t buy-in on the change and will resist it actively or passively.

Know the risks:

It is easy to plan such strategy and still fail miserably to communicate to the organization why it is important and why it has to be done this way. Communication is key here because any Big Top-down change is assured to elicit the most aggressive organizational immune response.

This risk can be mitigated by exchanging with the affected people well in advance, not just to inform them of what’s to come, but to allow them to express themselves and maybe even contribute in making the change less traumatizing for them. Getting any measure of buy-in from them will go a long way toward the success of the change endeavor.

Never underestimate the power of a large group of people dragging their feet.

Bottom-up

When you want real change, but are very conscious of limiting the possible damage if something goes wrong, the bottom-up strategy allows you to drive small change increments and observing results before committing at a larger scale.

Use this strategy when:

If your organization already follow a kanban approach, then this will be the way to go, as kanban prefer small but constant improvement over large wide-scale efforts. That’s one way of looking at bottom-up changes; there are two others.

The second one is the small, controlled experiment approach. That’s the one favored by Modern Agile. Find a group willing to participate, ask them to adopt a small change for a set amount of time, then debrief with them and choose to permanently adopt it, drop it or tweak it and retry the experiment. This participatory way of conducting change doesn’t require a huge plan and will give you a lot of data moving forward. When you are done with one change, move on to the next.

The last type of bottom-up change is the grassroots effort. That’s when the people affected by the change request it and drives it. You can’t get better ownership than that, and you get it right from the start. Grassroots efforts can be fragile, however, especially when they cannot get the buy-in from higher-ups.

Avoid this strategy when:

When the buy-in from higher-ups is necessary and won’t be possible, don’t waste your time with the bottom-up approach.

Know the risks:

A lack of buy-in from decision-makers within the organization will doom any bottom-up change efforts. Same goes for lack of buy-in from those asked to participate.

“Weak” buy-in from decision-makers, that is a verbal support that isn’t backed by actions will only drive the organization’s immune system to target the change effort and squash it. Over the years, I saw many department directors asking for change but unwilling to ask HR, finances, PMOs and other such groups to allow for the exemptions to the standard rules needed for the change to be successful. I saw people courageously agreeing to step into a new demanding role just to be told later than that all duties from their old role were still expected of them.

Organic cohorts

Writers such as Frederick Laloux and Dave Gray and others argue in favor of a much more organic approach to change in an organization, even if the two have significantly different takes on it.

In his book The Connected Company, Dave Gray describe a model where self-organized groups (called “pods”) plug into a platform that defines the boundaries of what they can do independently and what is expected of them in return, creating a networked company. Called Podularity, the model essentially calls for the creation of franchise-like entities within your company.

This strategy calls for testing the change strategy in a receptive target group (your first pod), see how it goes, broadcast the benefits to reassure the organization. You then readjust your strategy based on what you have learned, and start with a second receptive target group.

You will notice that the platform will constantly grow and change based on the result of practice, observation and back and forth between the pods and management. If your organization is a bit larger, maybe you will end up with more than a single platform. That is totally fine.

This approach will create a living dynamic between upper management and the pods. The platform will stabilize after a while but will always keep this ability to grow and change to better adapt to your current reality in a far more natural way than initiation big changes.

Use this strategy when:

When you want to evolve your company toward a more self-organized, decentralized and adaptative model, this strategy truly shines. It turns upper management into stewards of a sort, rather than taskmasters. It creates more autonomous and engaged employees, who will be better at responding to any situation that is local to them.

Avoid this strategy when:

Organic cohorts change people. Avoid this strategy when you require only a temporary change and plan to go back to normal after a while. It would create a traumatic effect even more important as a Big Top-down change as your employees will feel betrayed to have been granted autonomy only to see it recanted without cause.

Know the risks:

Going toward self-organization and autonomy changes people and the dynamics of the social contract between employer and employees. While this isn’t a problem in itself, it can be a risk to an organization who doesn’t realize the depth of the change in expectation about the dynamics within the organization. Understand what these kinds of changes mean and start on this path only if you feel that you can live with them.

It’s important that your pods get their constraints from the platform and not from the usual sources from the rest of the organization. The reason for that if you ask a group to change but still forces them to conform to all the same rules and requirements as before, you are not only sending a mixed message but in many cases you are preventing the change from succeeding.

We see this situation with Agile transformation all the time: the company request that a group becomes Agile but instead of gathering to their specific needs they still force the group to conform to traditional financing models, conventional project management models, and so on. The Agile transition fails to deliver on its promises simply there was never a real change, just a chaotic mess of contradicting rules.

Getting Help

Change management isn’t easy, and it’s certainly not second nature to most people. Getting professional help is advisable. To that end, many organization hires external consultants (like me).

Getting the right help can be tricky. Many consultants are familiar with only a specific approach to change management and might not be equipped to advise you properly. Look for a versatile one with experience, rather than one branded to a specific approach.

Don’t hire a consultant to drive the change for you. Your organization should take ownership of the change, and the actual work should be done by internal people. This is the only way that the consultant’s expertise will pass on to your organization and allows you to reinforce and maintain the change over time without depending on the consultant.

Don’t keep the consultant for too long. The value of an external consultant over an internal change manager is as much the different perspective brought in than the expertise. Perspective needs to be constantly nourished by different experiences and will weaken when deprived of that diversity. I wrote a blog post on that very subject.

Getting rid of change management

Change management will always be traumatic to an organization, even when that trauma is lessened by using the right strategy. The only way to getting rid of it to move away from change management.

Continuous improvement is a different type of strategy to approach change. Kanban and agile teams are already using this concept, but nothing limits it to them.

In continuous improvement, every group, no matter its size, strives to improve itself, its members and the benefits it brings to the company. It’s an entirely decentralized approach to change and adaptation that allows an organization to adapt and evolve as needed to better respond to its context while still following a vision.

I’ll discuss more organizational continuous improvement soon, so stay tuned!

Maurice Lefebvre

I am a futurist, system thinker and organizational transformation expert, dedicated to easing our transition into Society 5.0. I am available as a speaker through the think tank Hivernité (www.hivernite.ca) as well as a trainer and organizational coach through Moabi Formations (www.moabiformation.com).

www.hivernite.ca

Antifragility is the ability to thrive and prosper in chaos and adversity.

The concept comes from Nassim Nicolas Taleb, author of Black Swans, Antifragile and Fooled by Randomness.

In essence, it means that the ability to weather uncertainty, stress and opposition just isn’t enough. You need to learn to turn chaos and adversity into opportunity.

As someone who always has… “lived in interesting times”, the concept appeals to me at a visceral level. A serial entrepreneur and someone infinitely curious, I often gambled with large swaths of my life, many a time to my loss. Over time I learned to reduce the risks in my experiments. I found out that I now can do a lot more of them, and now and then one pays off, sometimes in unexpected ways. I have now far more options in my life than ever before.

This blog post is meant to be a quick introduction to the general concept of Antifragility and a couple of tricks to get you started. We are starting a journey here. Take your first step.

Fragile, Robust and Antifragile in a nutshell

It’s simple really.

Still, let’s go in a bit more details:

Fragile systems are optimized for efficiency and performance. In a stable and constant environment, they are usually the ones who will deliver the most value in the shortest time. However, they will fail quickly under stress, especially stress that is of a different nature what it is originally built to deal with. Race cars are a good example of a fragile system: unparalleled performances, but take them out of the controlled environment of the racetrack, and it will fall apart in minutes. Even of the racetrack, few cars can finish a single race without a pit stop.

Resilient systems are designed to withstand stress and punishment. A good resilient system will not get weaker or stronger from adversity; it will simply ignore it. Farm equipment is a good example of resiliency: it is build to work in all kinds of conditions and sturdy enough, so it won’t break miles away from the closest repair shop.

Antifragile systems are designed to improve with stress. They are not as tough as resilient systems or can’t reach peak efficiency like fragile systems, but they will grow and adapt where the two other strategies simply can’t. The human body is a good example of an antifragile system: our body builds muscles and reflexes through the stress of training, our mind gets better at making connections the more we learn.

Becoming Antifragile

“The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates and a monthly salary.”
– Nassim Nicolas Taleb

Here are a few tricks to get you started.

Never put all your eggs in the same basket

A specialty is always in danger of being inappropriate in a given situation or worse, becoming irrelevant.

As a person or a company, invest in a range of options. Become good at several things, cater to several markets. Diversification is one of the keys to antifragility. It gives you options. If you have several options it is doubtful they will all fail you at the same time, giving you something to fall back on.

Be careful about over-diversifying however. Diversity comes at the cost of high performance. If you take skills as an example, having a few highly specialized skills will net you the most income when they are useful, while several general ones will grant you something to fall back on.

Make small bets, but make dozens of them

All or nothing is just stupid. Yes, you can win big, but chances are that you will lose big. “Never put all your eggs in the same basket,” right?

Everyone and everything has a threshold of tolerance. Budget, the capacity to take on work or resistance to pressure. Find the threshold, and keep your experiments below it.

Follow your guts

Your instinct is the result of your brain analyzing far more inputs and cross-referencing with memories than your conscious mind can handle. It doesn’t mean your instinct is right, but it does mean that you should pay attention to it. Instincts will probably not steer you toward the most optimal scenario, but it will help you avoid the worst one.

Over millennia, we figured out that our instincts were not enough and so we develop logic to help us analyze our surroundings and decide on the best course of action. While a powerful tool, it is a dangerous one. Afraid of mistakes, we tend to rely way too much on it and end up rationalizing. You rationalize when you try to convince yourself of a course of action that you know isn’t good.

Don’t hope for the best, prepare for the worst

In clear, do not try to visualize all the good that can come to you to gather the courage to act. Try to picture the worst possible outcomes and actively prepare for it.

Do not trick your fear into going away. Fear is your friend. It is a good defense mechanism, one that’s telling you when something’s not right. Instead, do what’s need to be done to assuage your fear.

Take the Via Negativa

The Roman poet Ennius said, “the good is mostly in the absence of the bad”.

Doing something good is difficult but removing bad things will bring you closer to your goal than large drastic actions that can cause useless risks. As an example, instead of taking on a drastic diet, start by reducing carbs and fried food while increasing the variety of food you eat. It’s much easier to do and to maintain, and it will net you positive results without risking becoming ill from the diet.

Striving for good focus you on the result, blinding you to the real dangers you will face while getting there. Remove those dangers while knowing where good is and you’ll move toward it much more naturally and in a much safer way.

Do SOMETHING and do it NOW

Don’t waste time and opportunity waiting for a right time that will probably never come. Only large, risky undertakings are worth waiting the right time for. And by that, I mean waiting forever and instead to do something more manageable and constructive.

Take action and try something now, all the while keeping the other rules in mind: diversify, make numerous small bets, use gut feeling, remove the bad, prepare for the worst.

Now that you know where we’re going…

Take a look at yourself and your workplace. Can you identify fragile, robust and antifragile systems around you?

Can you improve aspects of yourself and your environment simply by using the Via Negativa and removing bad processes, or habits?

Can you identify within you, or your business, what are your specialties? Are you a generalist in other areas, at least at a high enough level to use these areas as a fall back if need be?

Get used to these kinds of questions. On the path of becoming antifragile, they will follow you, always.

Maurice Lefebvre

I am a futurist, system thinker and organizational transformation expert, dedicated to easing our transition into Society 5.0. I am available as a speaker through the think tank Hivernité (www.hivernite.ca) as well as a trainer and organizational coach through Moabi Formations (www.moabiformation.com).

www.hivernite.ca

I don’t care much about those.

I’m a practical man. I don’t care how unique you are. I want to know what you are good for. So should you: knowing what kind of role suits you better will help find a place where you can be both efficient and yourself.

I have noticed that leaders end up in one of three roles, plus one extra. Yep, for all of the uniqueness of your style, I pile leaders into a handful of heaps.

Good leaders understand one simple truth about their role: it’s not about them. It is never about them. It’s about a greater cause, which itself is usually about other people.

Keeping that thread in mind, let’s have a look at my three (plus one) heaps of leaders.

The Figurehead

A Figurehead is a human incarnation of an organization, a message or a cause.

Figureheads are important because they exist to make an abstract concept relatable. It’s also to firmly keep the attention on themselves.

Granted, many Figureheads are driven by their Mount Everest-sized egos, but the best ones stay focused on the fact that it isn’t about them. Sometimes they are mouthpieces. Sometimes they are visionaries. Sometimes they are exemplars. And sometimes they are distractions.

Startups often define themselves by their CEO, who’ll take the role of a Figurehead. His role is often less to build and grow his business than to propagate his vision and draw attention to what the startup is doing.

In a time of crisis, you will often see a Figurehead taking charge and issuing orders, acting as a focal point for people to rally around. The rest of the time they will focus their leadership on vision and high-level direction rather than day-to-day execution.

The Servant-Leader

“A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: We did it ourselves.” — Laozi, 6th century BCE

The Servant-Leader fundamentally understand that it’s not about him, but about others, and focus on that. Servant-leaders don’t always get the credit they deserve, but their influence can be felt wherever they go.

Servant-Leaders seems to always lead with the same question: “What can I do for you?”. They will remove impediments to other’s work, put people into learning situations for they can surpass themselves, and grow them into leaders in their own right.

Working behind the scenes, they use active listening followed by indirect action to find and remove obstacles often without anyone noticing. They try to figure out the root cause of problems rather than wasting time fixing symptoms.

Often instinctively, they will develop triadic relationships with people, meaning that instead of building one-on-one relations to control the flow of information, they will act as matchmakers between two other people who would benefit from direct contact. They build robust networks that can continue to grow without them. They mediate tough conversations. They simplify complex org chart-driven relationship by connecting humans.

Good servant-leader might do their best work discreetly, but they can have a tremendous influence over an organization. From grooming the next leaders to removing red tape and all the way to reshaping the flow of information in an organization by building networks, they can be the primary movers and shakers in the company.

All that without issuing a single direct order.

The Everyman Leader

If you don’t think you are cut to be a leader, then maybe you’d make a good Everyman Leader.

Everyman Leaders are all around you. They are the ones who see you struggle, take five minutes to teach one neat trick and show you that you can do it too. They’re the ones who will make that little bit of extra effort that will make your day. They are the ones you know you can trust when you need something done right.

Everyman Leaders can come from anywhere and do any jobs. It doesn’t matter if they handle important accounts, coordinate projects or wash dishes. They have work ethics, are genuine, helpful, and they want to make a difference, regardless of the scope of their impact.

That’s the easiest path to becoming a good leader. Just look at how you can make a difference in what you do and for the people around you. You just need to care and act.

In a time of crisis, you will notice Everyman Leaders rise to the occasion, help people around them rally and organize, and work cooperatively to resolve the part of the situation they have some influence over.

Wait, you’re missing one!

Now we come to the mysterious fourth role, the guy who barks orders and manages people.

The Boss.

During a crisis, leaders are granted authority and given control over a situation to help the organization through this challenging moment. A good leader never has to ASK for that authority: people will naturally look to the leader for guidance.

A Boss works differently. Control is the name of the game here, namely, how to achieve and keep it. To do so, they need to create situations of perpetual crisis, so they can retain their authority, and thus control, making it about them. Too much work for the capacity, predictive planning that everyone knows will be off the mark, office politics, information control, all of these are tactics to perpetuate situations of crisis artificially.

People don’t always do that consciously, and often that is how the whole organization functions. But that doesn’t change the reality of it, and that doesn’t make it right.

As such I cannot classify a Boss as a leader. Sorry. Being in charge just isn’t enough.

I know that because I was once a boss myself.

I didn’t know any better because I only operated in environments where I was tasked with keeping control over projects and teams. I wasn’t a bad boss (I’m sure opinions may differ…), but I was a crafter, planning perfect solutions and expecting proper execution. I tended to dismiss dissenting opinions, under the belief that I was in a position to know better. The organizations I worked for used all the tactics mentioned above to perpetuate states of constant crisis and trained new bosses in that environment.

I had to hit a wall before I could even realize the system was wrong. I have since dedicated my career to help organizations solve and resist crisis, to help bosses become leaders and to help people grow and develop to reach their potential.

While you don’t have to change your career as drastically as I did, you can still make a difference and become an agent of change wherever you are, in whatever position you have. Everyman Leaders do that every single day.

Maurice Lefebvre

I am a futurist, system thinker and organizational transformation expert, dedicated to easing our transition into Society 5.0. I am available as a speaker through the think tank Hivernité (www.hivernite.ca) as well as a trainer and organizational coach through Moabi Formations (www.moabiformation.com).

www.hivernite.ca

If you have ever lead a change endeavor, you had the pleasure to face some challenges. The fear and confusion brought by poor communication. The awakening of the organization’s immune system and the blanket resistance that comes with it. Or the planning is ridden with as many potholes as a Montreal’s street (believe me, that’s quite a lot).

One of the largest challenges is the sheer volume of situations you need to pay attention too, regardless of what they might be. It forces you to dilute your energy and often makes you lose sight of the goal or purpose of the change. There’s just too much noise.

The problem, however, isn’t that there’s too much to cope with. It’s just that we lose sight of what matters in all the noise. You can’t do everything, win every argument, convince everyone or even fight every possible battle.

The solution isn’t complicated, although it’s not easy. You have to learn to let go.

My younger self-learned that through a Zen practicing teacher of mine who would answer nearly all of my rants with the most frustrating questions ever: “Why?” and “Does it matter?” If you can’t answer those questions in a satisfactory way, then you have to let go.

Let go of what’s not worth fighting for

Learn to choose your battles. Some of them are decidedly worth your energy and should be fought to the bitter end. But such battles are few and far between.

Think about what you are about to fight for. Think of your reasons to fight. What you expect to get out of it. You would be surprised at how many of those important battles are in fact utterly hollow.

We get into most of our fights because of pride and stubbornness. Just like fighting things you can’t change, fights that aren’t worth the cost will just deplete your precious resources. Again, the trick is to be able to figure out the ROI of a potential fight quickly.

Compromising or switching to a different solution that accomplishes the same purpose but without the opposition is the best option for a potentially costly fight.

Let go of what you can’t do anything about

You can’t fight the wind.

Amongst the battles which are not worth the cost, fighting against constraints that will not change are the most wasteful. Compromising will not work on those unless you are the one making all the compromises.

Those immovable constraints need to be identified quickly and then dealt with with a bit of strategy. Some you can circumvent, some you leave alone, some you undermine undermined and, like the wind, some can be harnessed and made to work for you.

Keep in mind also that it is not because you cannot do anything about a constraint or situation now mean that you won’t be able to do something about it later. Context change and essential constraints can become irrelevant or beneficial.

Let go of that good idea you had

Yes, that idea was not just good, it was impressive.

Impressive enough to redo all your change plans to accommodate it? Can you sell that to everyone involved? No? It either wasn’t that good of an idea, or it wasn’t the right time for it.

Ideas are a very personal thing. We get attached quickly to the promising ones. But the better the idea, the more dangerous it is for that exact reason: it is too good to cast aside.

When such an irresistible idea comes, get into the habit of monitoring the cost of keeping it alive. The very second that cost surpass the benefits, it’s time to let it go.

Let go of that thing you really liked

Everyone have things we love and loathe to leave behind. In every change effort, you’ll find at least one such thing.

But it’s a thing. You can let go of a thing. You have a difficulty of letting some things go because of how it makes you feel, the time it saves you, or any other such underlying reason. By identifying that underlying reason you don’t want to let go of the thing, you can start looking for a replacement that fit with where you want to go.

Your thing can be many, well… things: It can be a tool, a location, a habit, a relationship. A lot of baggage makes moving forward more challenging. Find the essence and turn baggage into a springboard that will allow you to jump forward.

Focus on what’s essential

That very zen approach to change help getting rid of the noise so you can focus on what’s important. That’s the key to a successful change endeavor.

Learning to let go of the non-essential is simple to understand, but in practice, it’s hard to master. Dismissing the most trivial will come quickly enough, but even after years of practice I sometimes still struggle with letting go of whatever is close to my hard.

The practice of letting go is like a muscle. Just keep working at it, and it will become easier over time.

Maurice Lefebvre

I am a futurist, system thinker and organizational transformation expert, dedicated to easing our transition into Society 5.0. I am available as a speaker through the think tank Hivernité (www.hivernite.ca) as well as a trainer and organizational coach through Moabi Formations (www.moabiformation.com).

www.hivernite.ca

You hired talented people, and yet, no matter how exhaustive and precise your work orders are, they keep delivering results that are unexciting, limp, mediocre?

Have you thought that maybe your highly detailed work orders are what’s to blame? That a bit of vagueness, that breathing room is what your talented people need to deliver bottled awesomeness?

Unleashing creativity

In “change by design,” Tim Brown discuss that briefs handed down to designers. He argues that an exhausting list of granular requirements will more often than not result in a mediocre product that’s little more than a wrapping around the specifications. Instead, giving the design team as a set of goals and a few constraints as boundaries, then working with the team to refine them during the process, has in one example led to 350 concepts, more than 60 prototypes and 3 ideas brought to development.

In “Connected Company,” Dave Gray make a similar argument for using boundaries. His organizational model called Podularity use a platform, a boundary composed of constraints, support, and shared information, in which teams plug into. They have the freedom to tackle work and emerging situation as they see fit, as long as do so within the boundaries of the platform. This strategy allows the team to react faster and find more creative solutions since most of the decisional power reside in those closest to the situation.

In both cases, the idea is to give talented individuals the freedom to use their abilities in the best way possible, while making sure they don’t go too far off track.

Using such boundaries is an excellent way to foster intrinsic motivation within employees. In “Drive,” Daniel Pink explain that in most occupations, especially more creative ones, extrinsic motivation (i.e. carrots and sticks) end up being detrimental. Intrinsic motivation, based on a desire for mastery, autonomy, and purpose, creates engagement, a high level of satisfaction and creativity.

Creating the right kind of boundaries

The boundaries you create need to unlock creativity, not continue to hinder it using a different approach. While it is entirely possible to create boundaries so well defined that there’s little to no deviation from your expectation possible, such boundaries are not going to help you much.

The best boundaries allow breathing room. They should define the extent of your tolerance, a clear message not to go outside those bounds, but as long as the team stays inside, they are free to explore solutions.

Creating empowering boundaries is not very difficult. Start by asking yourself a few questions:

• In broad strokes, what do I want?
• In broad strokes, what I want to avoid?
• Why do I want or don’t want these things?
• What’s my budget?
• What’s my timeline?
• What data or reference material can I provide to the team?
• What data/reporting do I request from the team?

Answering those simple questions will open a discussion with the team. They will want some enlightenment, some guidance, some opinions on ideas. Keep in mind that you don’t need all the answers. “I don’t know. Show me something.” is an acceptable answer and a powerful one at that. Such an answer is a request for suggestions.

Boundaries must remain alive. They will change and evolve over the course of the project, through a back and forth between you and the team. Ideas get refined, constraints get refined. It is a necessity especially when there are several great concepts to choose from.

Keep them on track

Even teams used to boundaries can sometimes get lost in their explorations and creativity. But that possibility can be avoided by simple framing constraints.

Regularly requesting new prototypes or at least seeing the constant advances of a working and evolving solution will do the trick. Not only this will give a regular update on progress, but allow for discussing the solution(s) presented, progressively refining the boundaries.

Sometimes the team will struggle:

On more straightforward work, this situation will identify a flow problem. The use of a kanban board eases the identification of such flow issues early so you and the team can address them rapidly.

On creative endeavors, it can be trickier to identify struggling as progress is not necessarily linear. It can take a bit longer before realizing that the team is chasing its tail, or lost in too many possibilities. In the first case, identifying if any particular constraint is the problem will give you the information needed to provide additional support. In the second case, a team lost in the possibilities will benefit from an additional constraint or two to bring back focus.

Boundaries invigorates relationships

Working with boundaries rather than a full set of specifications will change your relation with your team. Depending on the nature of the work, it might mean for you to more involved or less involved than before, but the dynamic of the relationship will be different.

You will see genuine collaboration emerge with your team rather than a hierarchical rapport. You won’t simply be the person who assigns work, and then either micromanages the team or nearly ignore them. You will be a partner, who’s opinions and resources will be tapped by the team to provide you with what you need.

If this seems intimidating, maybe a workshop on modern leadership, like those from Management 3.0 (that we offer), would help. As work dynamics changes, leadership must evolve to address those changes better and make the most of these new relationships.

Maurice Lefebvre

I am a futurist, system thinker and organizational transformation expert, dedicated to easing our transition into Society 5.0. I am available as a speaker through the think tank Hivernité (www.hivernite.ca) as well as a trainer and organizational coach through Moabi Formations (www.moabiformation.com).

www.hivernite.ca