Edge Perspectives with John Hagel

Moving on

I want to let all the loyal subscribers who have subscribed to my blog posts here at Typepad know that I have decided to move my blog posts to my personal website - they can be accessed here https://www.johnhagel.com/blog/  Please subscribe there, so that you can receive notification of future blog posts.

There are several new blog posts already there, including some new poetry - Pandemic Paradox - and a perspective on Viral Flows. I look forward to continuing to share my perspectives with you there.

On the Edge of a New Decade

We’re heading into a new decade today. It’s not just a new year, but a new decade.* It’s a turning point, a historic moment, and provides us an opportunity to reflect on where we’ve been and where we’re headed.

It’s all in the numbers

I believe in the power of numbers. I don’t think it’s an accident that the year launching a new decade has special characteristics. First, it repeats numbers – this is the first decade in over a millennium (remember 1010?) that does that, and the next one will not come for another millennium. That in itself is an important sign.

Second, the number it repeats – 20 – has special significance in the field of numerology. The number 2 is viewed as a symbol of collaboration, duality and partnerships. The number 0 is viewed to be the symbol of infinity and wholeness – it suggests the potential to achieve exponential growth in potential. The key message of the two numbers together – 20 – is that we can achieve exponential growth in potential by coming together, and not trying to do it alone or as part of a small, isolated group. And repeating this pair of numbers underscores the power of the opportunity.

And, finally, let’s not forget 20/20 vision. Perhaps this is the decade that will enable us to see everything much more clearly than we have before.

The decade we’re emerging from

This last decade, the 2010’s, has been a challenging one. Significant advances in human well-being have occurred across the globe, but the paradox is that few people choose to focus on, or even know about, these advances.

Instead, we’ve become consumed by the emotion of fear, something that I have written about here. The emotion of fear is completely understandable given the paradox of the Big Shift, creating exponentially expanding opportunity while at the same time creating mounting performance pressure in the form of intensifying competition and the accelerating pace of change.

Fear manifests in many ways. We live in cultures that generally view fear as a sign of weakness, so few of us are willing to publicly acknowledge our fear. Instead, we tend to express other emotions, like anger, anxiety or loneliness. But if we look underneath, we’ll often see that fear is the driving emotion, shaping these other emotions.

Fear can help to explain some of the dominant trends in the past decade. For example, surveys around the world are confirming the continuing erosion of trust in all our institutions – not just companies, but also governments, schools and NGOs. When we’re afraid, we find it very difficult to trust anyone.

This natural trend is amplified by a more fundamental issue – as I’ve written about here, our institutions are driven by an institutional model that focuses on efficiency and, in a world of mounting performance pressure, focuses less and less on delivering value to their stakeholders. We’re becoming increasingly aware that our institutions are designed to serve their own interests, rather than our interests. Erosion of trust is a natural outcome.

There’s a second dominant trend of the past decade – growing polarization. Across the world, we’re finding ourselves in opposition – often violent opposition with each other. Again, when driven by fear, we have a natural tendency to separate from those who are different and seek the comfort and support of those whom we perceive as sharing our interests. This natural tendency is reinforced by the growing reliance of all our political leaders on threat-based narratives – our enemies are coming to get us, we’re all about to die and we need to mobilize now to resist these enemies.

Underneath all this is a trend that isn’t unique to this decade, but has been playing out for the past three decades – it’s the trend of growing global connectivity, driven by the exponential improvement in price/performance of digital devices that can be used by individuals and the networks that enhance the ability to connect, especially the Internet. We can now connect to far more resources and people than would have ever been imaginable a few decades ago.

It’s that trend that helped spawn the paradox of the Big Shift mentioned earlier – exponentially expanding opportunity and mounting performance pressure. And it’s all that connectivity that has spawned all that fear. Connectivity can be overwhelming if we don’t know how to harness it to our advantage. The 2010’s will increasingly be known as the decade of fear.

The decade we’re heading into

So, what’s next? As we move into a new decade, we have an opportunity to move in a new direction, one that can help us make the transition from fear to the passion of the explorer. And that in turn can help all of us to achieve far more of our potential.
What would be required to make this transition? It certainly won’t be easy. Fear is a very strong emotion and can be very challenging to overcome. The mounting performance pressure catalyzing this fear isn’t going away – if anything, it will increase even more in the decade ahead.

Opportunity-based narratives. So, what do we do? First, we need to acknowledge the fear – too many of us are still in denial. After all, if fear is widely viewed as a sign of weakness who wants to look weak in a time of increasing pressure?

We’ll be much more willing to acknowledge our fear if we realize that it’s a key barrier preventing us from addressing the exponentially expanding opportunities that are also on the horizon. We need to shift our focus from the threat-based narratives that dominate our discourse today to opportunity-based narratives that can inspire us to act in spite of our fear.

As an optimist, I believe this new decade will finally see the rise of opportunity-based narratives that can help all of us to make the journey from fear to the passion of the explorer. The exponentially expanding opportunities are simply becoming so attainable with far less effort and far more quickly that we’ll find it harder and harder to avoid seeing them. And, when we see them and become inspired by the opportunities ahead, we’ll see that our fear is holding us back from acting more boldly.

Small groups focused on impact. But opportunity-based narratives will not be enough. We’re going to need to come together in small groups where we can build deep trust with each other, enough trust so that we can feel comfortable expressing our fear and asking for help from others.

These small groups will help us to find ways to begin making an impact as we come together, inspired by the opportunities ahead. As we begin to make impact, it will give us more confidence that we can make a difference and that we need to overcome our fear to move forward.

We’ll never eliminate the fear, after all we will be venturing into territories that have not yet been explored. But we’ll find that the passion of the explorer motivates us to act in spite of the fear, because we are so excited by the opportunities ahead and because we have the support of others on the journey.

Networks. These small groups will be the key units to help us all begin the journey, but networks will help us to scale impact and inspire even more passion as we see the progress we’re making go exponential. We’ll finally find a way to harness all the connectivity that has shaped our recent decades so that it can help us address the true potential of the opportunity-based narratives that inspire us.

The opportunity-based narratives that will have the greatest impact in the decade ahead are ones that frame huge opportunities – e.g., integrating the marginalized into our expanding economies, producing more value with less resources and far less impact on our environment, harnessing the diversity that defines humanity to produce even more creative products and services, and fostering wellness so that we significantly increase the longevity of everyone.

The risk with such big opportunities is that they can quickly be dismissed as fantasies that are simply unattainable. Even if small groups can achieve some impact in their local context, the opportunities inspiring this action can seem overwhelming relative to the impact that is being achieved.

The key to inspiring even more commitment and bold action is to be able to quickly show accelerating impact. That’s where networks become key. We’ve all heard of network effects – the power of the network is that it can unleash exponentially expanding value and impact. And, guess what? The digital infrastructures we have been deploying and enhancing over the past several decades can provide connectivity on a global scale in ways that are accessible to a growing majority of the world population.

These networks will be explicitly designed to help small action-oriented groups learn faster by connecting them with each other. They will be key to addressing the big opportunities framed by opportunity-based narratives. They will help to reinforce our belief that we can accomplish far more when we come together. They will nurture the passion of the explorer that will help all of us to overcome our fear and take bold action because of the motivation to find ways to increase impact.

Movements. For those of you who have followed me, you’ll recognize that I’m talking about the emergence and growth of movements. I believe all of this will unfold in the decade ahead. I believe we are being inexorably pulled from the Fear Decade into the Launch Decade, a decade when we will launch ourselves into exponentially expanding opportunity for everyone.

Bottom line

This isn’t just a new year, it is the beginning of a new decade. It is truly an opportunity to reflect and reassess and, most importantly, to act in new ways that will help all of us to achieve more of our potential. Let’s come together and launch movements that will change the course of human history, for the benefit of all.

* Yes, I’m fully aware that technically the next decade doesn’t begin until 2021 but, come on, everyone believes that the new decade begins in 2020. This gives us an opportunity to drive change one year earlier – what could be wrong with that?

The Paradox of Leadership

I love paradox. Today I’m going explore not just one, but two, paradoxes. Both are related to the role of leadership in our changing world.

The first paradox: in a world of mounting performance pressure, we seek “strong” leaders with all the answers, when what we need are leaders with powerful questions.

The second paradox: those who have become disillusioned with the status quo are becoming champions of highly decentralized, leaderless “organizations,” when in fact we need leaders more than ever to help us accelerate our progress.

Response to mounting performance pressure

There’s yet another paradox underlying the two above. It’s the paradox of the Big Shift that I’ve written about extensively, including here. The paradox of the Big Shift is that it is creating exponentially expanding opportunity while at the same time creating mounting performance pressure

Most of us experience the mounting performance pressure first and foremost because we reside in institutions and communities that were designed for an earlier era. As competitive pressure mounts and the pace of change accelerates, we struggle to stay afloat, riding on boats that were designed for calmer seas.

In those rough seas, it’s very natural to feel fear and seek stability wherever we can. That makes us vulnerable to leaders who claim that they know what needs to be done and have all the answers required to weather the storm. It’s not an accident that we are seeing the rise of authoritarian leaders around the world.

The challenge of course is that, in a rapidly changing world of mounting performance pressure, no one has all the answers. The paradox is that the leaders we are initially drawn to are exactly the kinds of leaders that we need to avoid. They provide a false sense of security and leave us vulnerable to the changes ahead.

Instead, what we need are leaders who understand that we are facing new questions that we don’t yet have the answers for, but that could unlock the exponentially expanding opportunities arising in the Big Shift. We need leaders who can frame the questions in ways that inspire us, by highlighting the opportunities that the answers could unleash.

By framing these questions, these leaders could also inspire us to come together and express our need for help in ways that help us to build deeper trust and overcome the fear that holds us back. These questions could become particularly inspiring if they are crafted as part of opportunity-based narratives that represent a call to action, motivating us to come together in a quest to find answers for the questions.

While we are naturally drawn to the first type of leader in times of mounting performance pressures and growing fear, these leaders feed the fear, emphasizing the threats that we face and underscoring our need to “follow the leader.” At the same time, we all have a hunger for hope, and I believe we will ultimately realize that we need a very different kind of leader, one who motivates us to take initiative together to address growing opportunities.

Crafting new forms of institutional leadership

As we seek to re-build our institutions to address exponentially expanding opportunities and thrive in the Big Shift, we need to be careful to address the second paradox. Here, I am going to focus on institutional leaders, but I have also explored the implications for systems leaders as part of my work leading a World Economic Forum Council (our white paper is available as a pdf here).

It is natural, as we become disillusioned with the traditional institutional models that have dominated our society over the past century (I call them the “scalable efficiency” models), that we are tempted to throw out the baby with the bathwater. In our reaction to the dysfunctions of these traditional institutional models driven by the “strong leader” who has all the answers, there will be a natural temptation to try to do away with leaders altogether.

We are seeing this in many of the efforts to embrace distributed and decentralized organizational models that basically seek to eliminate leaders and rely entirely on local initiative. While very understandable, the paradox is that we need leaders more than ever in the Big Shift era, just a very different kind of leader to help focus and motivate participants in our institutions as they seek to move from mounting performance pressure to exponentially expanding opportunity.

Our institutional models will need to be re-built, moving from our existing “scalable efficiency” models to “scalable learning” models (an effort that I describe as institutional innovation). These scalable learning models will be fundamentally different from our current institutional models and they will require much more distributed initiative among the participants. But they will still require leaders.

What will be the role of leaders in scalable learning institutions? Their first role will be to focus participants by framing a powerful, long-term opportunity to create far more value than anything that has been achieved in the past. In a world of rapid change, there’s a natural tendency to fall into a reactive approach to the world, sensing and responding as quickly as possible to whatever is happening at the moment. We lose all sense of focus and spread ourselves too thinly across too many activities.

The role of leaders in a scalable learning institution is to pull everyone out of their narrow contexts and comfort zones and focus them on a very big opportunity that will challenge their current assumptions and behaviors. They are adept at framing opportunity-based narratives that are a call to action.

But there’s more. As suggested before, leaders in a scalable learning institution will frame inspiring questions related to the powerful, long-term opportunity. Since the opportunity is typically very different from anything that has been accomplished in the past, it is to be expected that we don’t yet know how to address this opportunity.

The role of the leader is to inspire all the participants by framing questions regarding the best approaches to address the opportunity and actively inviting everyone to come together in helping to evolve the most effective approaches. These questions also play a focusing role, but their key role is to inspire and motivate participants to act, making it clear that the opportunity won’t be addressed without significant effort, driven by a desire to learn.

The greatest value of these questions is to inspire a specific form of passion, that I've come to call the “passion of the explorer.” Based on our research, people with this form of passion are driven to learn faster and to achieve more and more impact in the domain that defines their passion. By drawing out this form of passion, leaders can move participants from inspiration to aspiration.

The goal isn't simply to make progress towards the opportunity by addressing the questions framed by leaders, it is to accelerate progress to the point where it goes exponential. That’s the aspiration of participants who have developed this form of passion. Leaders can reinforce this aspiration by focusing on the trajectory of performance improvement and encouraging everyone to evolve approaches that can accelerate impact.

That leads to yet another role for leaders. They can play a key role in designing environments that help to accelerate learning and performance improvement. Many participants may develop an aspiration to accelerate impact but find themselves in environments that hold them back rather than helping them to progress even faster.

While the goal for scalable learning institutions is to empower participants to design their own environments as they seek to accelerate their learning and performance improvement, leaders can certainly play a meaningful role in the early stages by highlighting the primary design goal - accelerating learning – and challenging all aspects of the institutional environments that are obstacles to that goal.

So, in short, institutional leaders still have a prominent role to play in the institutions of the future – creating focus, providing inspiration, cultivating aspiration and designing supportive environments. Without this new form of leadership, institutions are unlikely to be able to address the exponentially expanding opportunities that await us.

Bottom line

To navigate successfully through the Big Shift, we need to acknowledge and address two paradoxes of leadership. Leaders can still play a vital role in helping us to achieve more of our potential as individuals and as a society. In fact, one might even argue that we need these leaders more than ever. But they will be very different leaders from the ones we are accustomed to today in virtually all our large institutions. Cultivating these new forms of leadership will be very challenging for institutions and for the leaders themselves, but the rewards will be enormous. The key is to recognize the need and begin the journey.

The Quest of Questions

Questions are powerful.
Especially the ones
That don’t yet have an answer.
They can inspire us
To leave our comfort zone
And launch us on a quest,
A journey,
One with many obstacles
But also many rewards.
They can motivate us
To come together
In a shared quest.
They cultivate humility
And curiosity,
Giving us the strength
To overcome our fear
And venture out to the edge
Together
Where new insights await
Those who are bold enough
To explore.
We can achieve so much more
Of our potential
And accelerate our progress
If we embrace the questions.
Because, behind every question,
There are many more questions
Waiting to be seen.
The quest is never-ending.

The Quest for Capabilities

At the Center for the Edge, we’re launching a new research effort and we would welcome suggestions and ideas.

Redefining work

This research effort is an extension of our most recent research on the untapped opportunity that all institutions have to redefine work and deliver far more value to their stakeholders and the institution itself. At a high level, we encouraged institutions to move all workers in their organization from work that involves tightly specified and highly standardized tasks to work that involves addressing unseen problems and opportunities to create more value. This move becomes much more feasible now because technology is increasingly demonstrating the capability to take over routine tasks, freeing up worker capacity. This research has generated great interest because it is addressing a white space in the crowded topic of the future of work – a white space that has significant value creation potential.

Cultivating capabilities

One of the questions that we encountered when we shared our perspective on redefining work was: what do workers need to pursue this new form of work? This has led us to develop a contrarian view regarding another topic that is running rampant in future of work discussions. Everyone is talking about the need for re-skilling workers. The unstated assumption behind this discussion is that, if we don’t reduce the workforce as routine tasks get taken over by machines, we need to re-skill them so that they can move into other parts of the institution and perform a different set of tightly specified and highly standardized tasks.

We've come to believe that there’s another missed opportunity: to expand our horizons beyond skills and to focus in addition on human capabilities. So, what’s the distinction? Well, it’s ultimately about semantics, but I'll share what we mean by these two terms.

For us, skills are practices that are valuable in specific contexts, like how to operate a certain kind of machine in a particular environment or how to process certain types of paperwork in a particular business process. In contrast, human capabilities are practices that are valuable in any context – practices like curiosity, imagination, creativity, emotional intelligence and social intelligence.

There’s a further distinction that can be made. Some human capabilities are innate – all children display them. These include the capabilities I just mentioned. For these capabilities, we use the metaphor of the human muscle. We all have muscles as humans. If we don’t exercise our muscles, they tend to atrophy, but we still have them. Once we begin to exercise, the muscles grow again.
But there’s another set of capabilities that need to be developed – we don’t all have them at the outset. Capabilities in this category include practices like critical thinking and leadership.

Once again, these capabilities - whether innate or developed – are valuable in all contexts. They are also very valuable in terms of helping people acquire necessary skills more quickly and more effectively. People who have exercised innate capabilities and acquired developed capabilities will be much better positioned to acquire whatever skills they need to be successful.

While institutions are relentlessly focused on skill-building and re-skilling in a world of accelerating technological change, few institutions are paying any attention to capabilities (with the narrow exception of leadership capabilities – the assumption being that capabilities are really only relevant to leaders).

We believe this is another significant untapped opportunity – to expand our horizon beyond skills and to pay more attention to cultivating capabilities.

The quest for case studies

Once we've identified an opportunity like this, our research methodology focuses on developing case studies. We look for institutions that have already begun to address the opportunity and study the approach they pursued, the impact they achieved and the lessons that they learned along the way. Our experience from past research efforts is that, even with very new and largely unaddressed opportunities, we can generally find a few institutions that are “on the edge” and already starting to address the opportunities.

Even though we're based in Silicon Valley and the heart of the tech industry, we're also careful to expand our search beyond the usual suspects. We try to find examples of institutions in a broad range of more traditional industries and a variety of countries to persuade institutional leaders that this is an opportunity for everyone.

The questions shaping our research

So, here’s the ask:

• What does everyone think about the distinction between skills and capabilities?
  
  • Is it a useful distinction?
  • What needs to be clarified?
  • What do you disagree with, or where would you need more evidence to be convinced?
• Are there examples of institutions that are tracking capabilities within their workforce?
  
  • How are they measuring capabilities?
  • Are they seeking to measure the impact of capabilities on performance?
• Are there examples of institutions that are actively seeking to cultivate capabilities within their workforce, especially their frontline workers, and not just their managers and top executives?
  
  • What are they doing to cultivate capabilities?
  • How much of the effort involves programs designed to do this and how much of the effort focuses on simply creating work environments that encourage workers to exercise their capabilities more actively in their day to day jobs?
  • Are they explicitly measuring the rate of capability cultivation?
• Are there examples of institutions that are explicitly seeking to find candidates with certain capabilities in their recruiting programs?
  
  • If so, how are they assessing capabilities among their candidates?

Bottom line

We believe that institutions that make more focused efforts to cultivate capabilities among their entire workforce will be much better equipped to manage the big shift from routine task work to work that addresses unseen problems and opportunities to create more value. We believe those institutions will ultimately overcome the diminishing returns that's the natural result of a focus on scalable efficiency and routine tasks. They will ultimately be the institutions that thrive in a rapidly changing world by focusing on scalable learning that can create exponentially expanding value for the stakeholders and the institution itself. We’re in the early stages of this big shift but we believe that there are already some institutions that are beginning to address this opportunity. We urgently need to learn from them.

Expanding Our Horizons

I’ve written about the paradox of the Big Shift – the forces reshaping our global economy are simultaneously creating exponentially expanding opportunity and mounting performance pressure.

Here’s the challenge. In a world of mounting performance pressure, we have a natural human tendency to shrink our horizons. We focus only on the short-term. We focus only on ourselves. We focus only on external events that threaten us. Our horizons become narrower and narrower – as individuals, as institutions and as a society. While understandable, these tendencies also can generate a vicious cycle – the more we shrink our horizons, the more pressure we experience, which leads us to shrink our horizons even more.

How do we escape this vicious cycle and move from pressure to opportunity? We have to start by expanding our horizons – looking ahead, looking around and looking inside. I’m going to focus here on what this means for our institutions, but a similar imperative exists for us as individuals and as a society.

Look ahead

As institutions face increasing pressure, they begin to move away from long-term strategies and embrace flexibility and agility. The key is to sense and respond to whatever is happening in the moment – that’s a winning strategy.

I’ve become a strong proponent of an alternative approach to strategy that I call zoom out/zoom in, something that I learned by working with some of the most successful tech companies in Silicon Valley. This approach to strategy starts by zooming out 10-20 years and challenging leadership to develop a shared view of what their relevant markets or industries might look like then and what the implications would be for the kind of company they will need to be in order to be successful in that market or industry.

The zoom in side seeks to build alignment and commitment within the leadership regarding the 2-3 initiatives they could pursue in the next 6-12 months that would have the greatest impact in accelerating movement towards the longer-term destination. The goal is to ensure that a critical mass of resources are committed to these short-term initiatives.

By looking ahead to identify the really big opportunities that could be targeted given the exponential changes playing out in our global economy, this approach pulls leaders out of the short-termism that drives our institutions and helps them to see beyond the short-term pressures that consumes their attention.

Look around

That leads to a second opportunity to expand our horizons – rather than just focusing on ourselves, we need to focus on others around us and explore the potential to come together to achieve things that we could never accomplish on our own.

This requires understanding the unmet needs and motivations of others. In the zoom out effort that I mentioned before, institutions too often stay focused on their own needs and capabilities rather than starting with the unmet needs of the customers and other stakeholders they are serving. The really big opportunities out in the future start with unmet needs of others. Look around while looking ahead.

Then, as we start to focus on addressing those unmet needs, we need to look around to see who could help us have even greater impact more quickly in addressing those unmet needs. In the exponential world we are entering, leverage is a key driver of success – learning how to achieve greater impact with fewer resources. We need to put ourselves in their place and understand what would motivate them to join forces with us.

And, don’t just focus on economic motivation of others. It was Dee Hock, the founder of Visa, who challenged me one day when I was talking about risk and rewards as motivators and said that the real need was to focus on fear and hope. Emotions (or heartset) ultimately are much more powerful motivators.

And, as we look around, let’s avoid a transactional view of others and instead focus on how we can build long-term, trust-based relationships. These trust-based relationships will be key to unlocking the potential to learn faster together by addressing significant performance challenges that require collaborative effort to solve. If we can unlock that scalable learning potential, we can drive even greater motivation to collaborate over an extended period of time.

If done right, looking around can unleash a powerful third form of growth. Most institutions today think of growth in terms of two options – make or buy – either grow organically or do a major acquisition. As I’ve written elsewhere, there’s a third path to growth that’s not yet on the agenda, but needs to be – leveraged growth. How can we connect with and mobilize a growing number of third parties to add value to our customers and stakeholders while capturing some of that value for ourselves?

By looking around, we can also pursue shaping strategies that restructure entire markets or industries, rather than remaining content with simply anticipating and adapting to whatever changes are coming.

Look inside

This is the most challenging approach to expanding horizons. In times of mounting performance pressure, we understandably begin to be driven by fear. Since fear is generally viewed as a sign of weakness, we tend to want to avoid acknowledging the fear. We hide from our emotions, and focus on the avalanche of short-term events and the flood of external data that can distract us from what is going on within us.

But, if we don’t understand the emotions that are shaping our thoughts and actions, we will have little hope of achieving the kind of impact that will be needed to thrive in an exponentially changing world. We need to look within and explore the emotions that are driving us. We need to feel the fear.

Rather than living in denial, we need to accept and understand those emotions. Then we need to find ways to evolve those emotions so that we can move from fear to hope and excitement. The real goal here is find the passion of the explorer that I believe resides within all of us and is waiting to be discovered and cultivated.

Let me be clear. I don’t believe we’ll ever eliminate fear as an emotion within us. Again, it is a natural and understandable emotion in a world of mounting performance pressure. Instead, we need to cultivate other emotions that will help us to move forward in spite of that fear. Those who have the passion of the explorer definitely feel fear – they are attempting things that have never been done before where there is a high risk of failure. But they are driven by the excitement of achieving greater impact and that helps them to move forward despite the fear that lurks within.

In this context, we need to understand how expanding horizons on other dimensions can also help us to address the fear that may be holding us back. By looking ahead, we can begin to see inspiring opportunities that we might never have imagined possible. Those opportunities can help to draw out hope and excitement.

By looking around, we can begin to see others who are similarly motivated to address those opportunities. We’re not alone. We can draw support and energy from others, especially if we focus on building deep, trust-based relationships where we can feel comfortable sharing our emotions and be more willing to rely on others as we embark on this journey together.

Bottom line

We need to find ways to overcome mounting performance pressure and harness the exponentially expanding opportunities created by the Big Shift. The only way to do that is by expanding our horizons. We need to look ahead, look around and look within. And we can’t just do one of those. We need to do all three together.

And we can’t just look. We need to act on all three dimensions, because the most powerful way to learn is through action.
And we shouldn’t just do this at the level of our institutions. We need to do this as individuals and as a society. The biggest rewards will come when we expand our horizons on all three levels – individuals, institutions and society.

And the rewards will be monumental. We have an opportunity to achieve far more of our potential as we begin to see how, by coming together, we can address opportunities that would have been unimaginable a few decades ago.

Business Models and Trust

Three years ago I sketched out three dimensions of business model evolution in response to the mounting performance pressure of the Big Shift. In this blog post, I want to highlight the role of this business model evolution in restoring trust in our corporations.
A growing number of surveys around the world highlight the continuing erosion of trust in all our institutions. While this is a widely recognized trend, relatively little effort has been made to explore why this erosion of trust is occurring and what can be done to restore that trust.

There are many factors at work here, given that the erosion of trust is occurring in all our institutions, and it's something that I've written about before in "Re-Building Trust In Our Institutions."  In this blog post, I’m going to focus on how business model evolution can and will help to overcome the trust challenge for corporations. It will also highlight the growing risk of remaining wedded to existing business models that are contributing to the erosion of trust.

Payment

For those who haven’t seen my previous blog post on business model evolution, I started by focusing on the dimension of payment. Traditional business models have largely been built on the expectation that customers will pay upfront for a product or service. I suggested that we’re increasingly moving to business models where payment is based on usage – we pay based on our usage of the product or service with little, if any, payment up front. Looking ahead, I anticipated that payment models would further evolve to payment based on impact achieved, not just usage.

The more explicitly we can tie payment to impact achieved, the more successful we will be in restoring trust. In this model, the customer will not have to pay unless the promised impact has been achieved. Today’s upfront payment business models tend to foster a short-term transactional mindset in companies – make the sale, collect the cash and move on.

If we start to focus on impact, companies will need to evolve a longer-term view of customer benefit. Now, the “sale” will just be the catalyst for developing a much deeper relationship where the vendor is committed to working with the customer to achieve the promised impact. That mutual commitment to impact will help to re-build the trust of the customers that the vendor’s interests are aligned with their own interests.

Of course, there will be many challenges in evolving to this impact-based business model, but we're now developing the technology that will make it possible to vendors and customers to interact in a much richer, real-time way that can help both sides to focus on impact achieved.

Data

The second dimension of business model evolution involves the increasing revenue potential from providing insights from data back to the customer. As technology evolves to provide greater visibility into how products and services are being used by customers, vendors have an opportunity to harness the value of the data for the customers, creating helpful feedback loops for customers.

They can start by providing data-driven services to give customers more insight into the current context in which they are using products and services. As data technology evolves, there’s an opportunity for vendors to provide customers with the ability to anticipate problems and opportunities that might arise as they use the vendors’ products and services. Given further evolution, vendors can harness data to provide more prescriptive value to customers, not just helping them to anticipate future events, but providing valuable advice in terms of the best ways to respond to these future events, so that customers can receive even more value.

This is in sharp contrast to how most data about customers is used today. Vendors generally use customer data today to improve the efficiency of their internal operations and to help them more efficiently target customers from a marketing viewpoint. Customers increasingly realize that the data about them that is being captured by the vendors is being used by the vendors to create more value for themselves, rather than for the customers. The result? Trust erodes.

As business models evolve on the data dimension, companies have an opportunity to re-build trust. Now they become focused on providing more and more value back to the customer based on the data that is being accessed. As customers begin to see the value of these insights offered by vendors, they are likely to be more and more willing to pay for the insights generated from the data they have provided. They are also likely to be willing to provide vendors with access to even more data about themselves because they can now see the tangible value they are receiving in return. Trust will be restored as they see that the vendors are committed to helping customers get even more value from the products and services they are offering.

Participants

In today’s business models, the ideal outcome for the vendor is a one to one relationship with the customer. This is the nirvana of push-based marketing.

That’s going to change. As customers become more powerful and demanding, they are going to seek out vendors who can connect them with a broader range of products and services from third parties. Initially, vendor business models will focus on building platforms that can scale and provide access to more and more third parties. Over time, technology infrastructures and tools will evolve to the point where vendors are able to connect customers to relevant third parties wherever they reside, whether or not they are on a specific platform.

Vendors who help customers to connect with a broader range of products and services from third parties will be able to capture some of that value for themselves by charging customers for this service. Rather than trying to isolate and insulate customers from everyone else, vendors will see that there’s an untapped opportunity to deliver more value to customers and, in the process, capture some of that value for themselves. The key is that the customers need to pay for this service, rather than having third-party vendors pay commissions. If it is a commission-based model, customers will likely suspect that the needs of third-party vendors are being served, rather than their own needs.

If customers pay for this service, they will begin to see that vendors have their interests in mind and are becoming more and more helpful in connecting them with the resources and expertise that are most valuable to them. Rather than seeing vendors as trying to “capture” them, they will see vendors as trusted agents who are providing them with more and more value by connecting them with a broader range of resources.

Tying it all together

My earlier blog explicitly cautioned that I was not suggesting that business models for all vendors would evolve to the same extent across all three dimensions. These are simply three paths for evolution and vendors will need to determine which position on these three dimensions is optimal for them. Nevertheless, I did indicate that I believed there would be significant evolution on these three dimensions given the growing power of customers and the evolution of technology capabilities that would make it increasingly feasible to evolve on these three dimensions.

As business models evolve on these three dimensions, there will be an opportunity to deepen the alignment of the long-term interests of vendors and customers. Rather than pursuing short-term transactional models, vendors will find themselves building much deeper, trust-based relationships with customers.

I should note, as I did in my original blog, that I have explicitly not included any discussion of advertising- based business models. This is because I don’t believe advertising-based business models will be sustainable in the Big Shift. Push based advertising is going to prove to be a less and less effective way to reach and engage with ever more powerful customers.

Instead, we are likely to see pull based marketing approaches prevail. As a result, vendors will need to find ways to deliver more and more value to customers in ways that will make customers more willing to pay for that value themselves. In the process, customers will develop more trust in vendors because they will be paying the bills, rather than advertisers, so the interests of the vendors are likely to be more clearly aligned with the customers.

Bottom line

Erosion of trust in companies is a growing challenge that all companies will need to address. One powerful way to do this is to evolve business models in ways that move companies from a short-term transaction mindset to a mindset that focuses on building long-term, trust-based relationships. Companies that remain wedded to our current business models are likely to find themselves increasingly marginalized as more and more powerful customers seek out vendors who are willing and able to embrace business models that more effectively align the interests of customers and vendors.

This shift in business models will be one important dimension in the broader shift in institutional models from scalable efficiency models to scalable learning models. This institutional innovation will be deeply challenging, but the rewards will likely make the journey very worthwhile. Rather than just focusing on the diminishing returns of internal efficiency, companies will find that they are able to create and deliver far more value to their customers as they embrace business models that drive them to learn more about the value that is most meaningful to their customers.

Learning and Strategy

Scalable learning will be the key to institutional success as we move deeper into an exponentially changing world. But to really scale learning, we’re going to need to adopt a very different approach to strategy – the “zoom out, zoom in” approach. This post will explore why these two approaches are so tightly connected.

Scalable learning                                                                                                                                                                        I’ve written a lot about scalable learning. In our research on the Big Shift that is transforming the global economy, we’ve come to believe that all our institutions will need to make a fundamental shift from a scalable efficiency model to a scalable learning model.

Over the past century, the scalable efficiency model has driven the growth and success of large institutions around the world – corporations, governments, universities, NGO’s, etc. In this model, the primary focus is how to perform complex tasks very efficiently and reliably at scale. The way to achieve this has been to tightly specify and highly standardize all tasks. In a more stable world, this produced significant efficiency.

But here’s the challenge. Our world is no longer stable. It’s evolving at an accelerating rate with growing uncertainty. Customers are also being more powerful and less and less willing to settle for standardized, mass market products and services. The combination of these two forces creates a paradox: scalable efficiency is becoming less and less efficient.

So, what’s the alternative? Scalable learning. In a rapidly changing world, the ability to learn faster at scale will increasingly determine success.

Let me clarify. By learning, I don’t mean training programs or the sharing of existing knowledge. I’m talking about learning in the form of creating new knowledge by confronting situations that have never been seen before and developing new approaches to create value. That kind of learning occurs in the work environment on the front line. It’s learning through action, not just sitting and reading books or thinking great new thoughts.

And it will encourage us to come together into tightly knit workgroups rather than working in isolated cubicles. No matter how smart any one of is, we’ll learn a lot faster if we are working closely with a small group of others who are equally committed to achieving higher and higher impact. In short, this form of learning will require redefining work for everyone at a fundamental level and the adoption of new practices within workgroups to accelerate learning.

If we understand the implications of scalable learning, we’ll realize that it’s in fundamental conflict with the scalable efficiency models that prevail in all our institutions today. We’re going to have to choose which institutional model to adopt and, if we choose scalable learning, it will require us to pursue a broad program of institutional innovation, rethinking every aspect of our existing institutions.

And, here’s a key observation: scalable learning will actually be much more efficient at scale than the traditional scalable efficiency model. Rather than tightly specifying and standardizing all tasks, the most efficient way to respond to rapidly changing contexts will be to help participants on the front line to learn faster about the new approaches that will deliver the most value efficiently.

The challenge                                                                                                                                                                            This shift will not be easy. It will be extremely challenging, requiring transformation of all our institutions. It will require leaders to overcome the resistance of the immune system and antibodies that exist in all large institutions.

To do that, institutional leaders will need to develop the conviction and commitment to embark on that challenging journey of change. Many things are holding them back. One key obstacle is the widespread view that learning is an expense and something to be tightly managed in the name of scalable efficiency. Leaders need to discard that conventional view of learning and begin to see how critical learning is to creating significant new value, while at the same time helping the institution to become more efficient. What can help them do that?

Zoom out, zoom in approach to strategy                                                                                                                                     This is where a new approach to strategy can play a key role. It can help leaders to see that learning is actually key to unlocking significant new value for the institution. It’s not an expense, but something that can be unleashed to quickly deliver rapid improvements to performance.

Institutions have increasingly moved to reactive forms of strategy where the key goal is to sense and respond as quickly as possible to what is happening at the moment. This approach fosters incrementalism and tends to spread the resources of the institution across a growing number of initiatives, so that nothing receives a critical mass of attention or resources. It’s actually very inefficient.

That’s why I’ve become a big proponent of an alternative approach to strategy. It’s called the zoom out, zoom in approach to strategy, an approach that’s outlined in detail here.

In brief, this approach focuses on two time horizons in parallel. The zoom out time horizon is 10-20 years and addresses two key questions: What will our relevant market or industry look like 10-20 years from now and what kind of institution will we need to be to be successful in that market or industry?

The zoom in time horizon focuses on a very different time horizon – 6-12 months. On that horizon, the key questions are: what 2-3 initiatives could we pursue in the next 6-12 months that would have the greatest impact in accelerating our movement towards that longer-term opportunity and do we have a critical mass of resources against those 2-3 initiatives in the next 6-12 months?

Tying strategy back to scalable learning                                                                                                                                       The power of this approach to strategy is that it focuses the institution on a long-term opportunity to create unparalleled value and impact by harnessing the exponential forces that are re-shaping our global economy and society. In an exponential world, those opportunities will require fundamentally different approaches and organizations relative to the ones we have today. It will require profound learning at scale in the form of creating new knowledge, not just sharing existing knowledge.

This is very powerful on two levels. First, it helps to focus learning efforts. In a rapidly changing world, the risk is that there is so much potential for learning that we could easily spread ourselves too thinly and consume all our time and attention on learning things that are quite peripheral to the impact we are trying to achieve. By zooming out, we can focus our learning efforts on the most significant opportunities for impact.

Second, by framing an unprecedented opportunity to create value and impact, the zoom out approach can help to inspire participants to engage in learning aggressively. Remember, when we talk about learning in the form of creating new knowledge through action, there’s likely to be a lot of failure along the way. That’s very risky and naturally generates fear. The zoom out approach helps to move people from fear to hope and excitement as they begin to focus on an amazing opportunity.

But, there’s more. The zoom in approach helps to focus participants on the action they can take in the near-term to achieve impact and accelerate their movement towards the longer-term opportunity. That’s a significant opportunity to learn through action. As we pursue the zoom in initiatives we can begin to see what impact is being achieved and learn how to evolve our approaches to generate even more impact over time. These near-term initiatives will also help us to refine and evolve our view of the longer-term zoom out opportunity as we begin to see whether we are achieving the impact that we anticipated.

This zoom in approach helps to generate tangible impact in the near-term that is also powerful on two levels. First, it addresses the need that all our institutions have to demonstrate impact quickly. If we just focus on a 10-20 year opportunity without addressing the need for near-term impact, we risk consuming ourselves in initiatives that may or may not produce results for a long time with a lot of wasted resources and investment along the way. On the other hand, by framing the short-term initiatives in the context of a very big longer-term opportunity, we reduce the risk of falling into incremental moves that may produce short-term results, but ultimately lead us to a dead-end.

Second, the emphasis on near-term impact also helps to overcome the skepticism and fear that naturally arises if we are presented with a very big opportunity that has never been achieved before. By focusing on delivering short-term results, we again help to move participants from fear to hope and excitement.

Bottom line                                                                                                                                                                                  By pursuing a zoom out, zoom in approach to strategy, we can build conviction and commitment to the imperative of shaping scalable learning institutions. Focusing participants on an unprecedented longer-term opportunity to create more value and impact makes it clear that significant learning will be required – simply becoming more efficient with our tried and true approaches will not get us there. If it’s a really big opportunity – an exponentially big opportunity – it will also make it clear that this learning will need to be scaled rapidly throughout the institution.

At the same time, focusing participants on a small number of short-term initiatives that can quickly deliver tangible results helps to focus learning through action. It also overcomes the widespread belief that learning is an expense item that needs to be tightly controlled in the name of efficiency. Now, learning through action will produce significant near-term impact on metrics that matter. In fact, learning is a by-product of initiatives designed to find ways to increase impact, rather than an investment that may never yield returns.

Learning is not an expense. Properly focused, it is a key to unlocking expanding value creation, while at the same time improving efficiency. Zoom out, zoom in can make those economics much more tangible while at the same time helping participants overcome fear and develop excitement about the opportunities that learning can unleash.

But, what about investors and their relentless quest for short-term earnings and nothing else? I’ll avoid the temptation to make this post even longer, and instead invite you to stay tuned for my next blog post that will address that question.

Narratives to Drive Exponential Learning

In our Big Shift world, the imperative of scalable learning is becoming increasingly urgent. If we’re smart about it, we have the potential to unleash the potential of exponential learning.

As many of you know, I have spent over a decade studying the long-term forces that are re-shaping our global economy, something that I call the Big Shift. There are many ways of representing the Big Shift, but one dimension is the need to shift from institutional models driven by scalable efficiency to ones driven by scalable learning.

Scalable learning                                                                                                                                                                     When I talk about scalable learning, I'm not focused on learning in the form of training programs that simply share existing knowledge. In a world that is changing at an accelerating pace, existing knowledge rapidly becomes obsolete and the most valuable form of learning is creating new knowledge. Those who learn faster at scale will thrive in the Big Shift world, while those who just focus on sharing what they already know will soon be marginalized. To learn faster at scale, we’ll need to redefine work and cultivate business practices within front-line workgroups so that workers can learn through action by addressing previously unseen problems and opportunities to create more value.

Doing this at scale will require a profound transformation of our institutions – how they are organized, how they operate and how they are led. I want to spend this blog posting exploring the potential of opportunity-based narratives to drive exponential learning.

Opportunity-based narratives                                                                                                                                                   Those who have been following me for a while know that I make a key distinction between stories and narratives, even though most people treat these two words as synonyms, something that I’ve developed here and here. For me, a story is self-contained – it has a beginning, middle and an end. Also, stories are about me, the story teller, or some other people – they're not about you in the audience.

In contrast, for me, narratives are open-ended, there is no resolution – yet. There’s some kind of significant opportunity or threat out in the future and it’s not clear whether it will be effectively addressed. The resolution of the narrative hinges on you, the listener. It is a call to action since your choices and your actions will help to resolve this narrative.

Narratives as a catalyst for learning                                                                                                                                            Why are opportunity-based narratives so critical to learning? There are many reasons. They’re a call to action and the key to creating new knowledge is action – people who passively sit around, even if they’re thinking great thoughts, aren’t going to learn as fast as those who are actively trying out new approaches to create value and reflecting on the impact that’s been achieved so that they can refine the approaches to create even more value. Action is key to accelerating knowledge creation.

Narratives help to focus learning by framing a powerful opportunity that can inspire and motivate people to explore new approaches that are all seeking to address the same opportunity. While helping to focus people, narratives also make it clear that the best approaches are not yet known and invite many diverse efforts to frame approaches that can be more effective in addressing the opportunity.

Narratives are also a powerful way to bring people together. No matter how smart any individual is, they will learn a lot faster if they are working together to address a new opportunity. And here’s the real opportunity: institutional narratives are not directed at the people within the institution. They are a call to action to people outside of the institution – so they speak to a much larger group of potential participants.

One of the few examples of this kind of institutional narrative can be found in the slogan developed by Apple in its early days: Think different. Unpack the slogan and it's a powerful narrative. It started by describing the early impact of digital technology in taking away our names and giving us numbers, putting us in cubicles and making us cogs in a machine. It then suggested that we had a new generation of technology that for the first time would enable us to express our unique individuality and achieve more of our potential. But that wasn’t going to happen automatically. We all had to think different – that was the call to action and it spoke to such a deep aspiration that it’s the reason why, for many, Apple became the equivalent of a religion.

It inspired many people to explore how to think different, so that they could achieve more of their potential. It also inspired a growing number of third parties to develop software applications that could help people to think different and become more creative. And, of course, it inspired the employees within Apple to find ways to develop products and services that could support this quest. Groups began to come together, connecting people both within the company and outside the company, inspired by the opportunity to find ways to think different and to create the tools to help people to think different.

Effective opportunity-based narratives are not just about inspiration. These narratives can often become catalysts for a much deeper form of motivation – a specific form of passion that I call the passion of the explorer, that I’ve written about here and here. The combination of a powerful opportunity that hasn't yet been addressed and the ability to come together with others to explore ways to achieve that opportunity can draw out the passion of the explorer in many of the participants. These people are driven to find ways to have more and more impact as they embark on a quest shaped by the opportunity ahead. Without this passion, people can certainly learn, but they will not learn as quickly or deeply as those who are driven by this passion. Passionate explorers are unstoppable.

Going exponential                                                                                                                                                          Opportunity-based narratives have the unique ability to drive exponential learning because they harness the power of network effects where, the more people who participate in the effort to address the opportunity, the faster everyone learns. The pace of learning doesn’t just improve linearly, it accelerates to the point where learning begins to improve exponentially. In a world that’s increasingly shaped by exponential change, the ability to unleash exponential learning can be a significant source of advantage.

It’s worth noting here that, if we continue to focus on learning in the form of sharing existing knowledge, there’s no way that form of learning can go exponential. In fact, sharing existing knowledge has diminishing returns – the more knowledge we share, the longer and harder we have to work to share that knowledge to a smaller and smaller pool of people who have not yet received that knowledge. By focusing on learning in the form of creating new knowledge, we unlock the ability to go exponential because there is no limit to the new knowledge that can be created and people can learn much faster when they come together.

What can help learning to go exponential? Two things – a cellular form of organization and a zoom out/zoom in approach to learning.

Cellular organization                                                                                                                                                                  The most effective form of learning occurs in small groups of 3-15 people who get to know each other very well and develop deep, trust-based relationships with each other. That deep trust helps the participants to ask for help and to be more supportive of each other’s efforts to take risks and learn faster. Once you get more than about 15 people in a group, that deep form of trust is much more challenging to build, which is why the most effective cells tend to stay small.

But, if it were just about individual cells, there would be no ability to harness network effects and go exponential. The key is to connect these cells into broader and broader networks so that participants in cells can look beyond their cells to observe the impact achieved by each cell and learn from the diverse experiences as more and more cells seek to pursue new approaches in addressing the opportunity that brings everyone together. They can also reach out to participants in other cells when they have specific questions or needs that their own cell cannot answer.

What I’m describing here are creation spaces, a very different way of organizing than the hierarchical approach that defines most institutions today. And here’s the thing – these creation spaces can and should extend beyond the boundaries of any single institution. Individual cells might even include participants from both inside and outside the institution, but cells will increasingly form both within and outside institutions as the opportunity-based narrative inspires more and more people to join in the quest to address the opportunity.

These creation spaces naturally form in arenas that display sustained extreme performance improvement, ranging from extreme sports like big wave surfing and extreme skiing to online wargames. They are a powerful way to accelerate learning.

Zoom out/zoom in                                                                                                                                                         Opportunity-based narratives are very effective in helping people to zoom out and see a big, long-term opportunity. But the zoom out/zoom in approach that I've championed in the business strategy arena is relevant here as well because it focuses participants on two horizons simultaneously.

In addition to framing a compelling long-term opportunity, this approach encourages participants to zoom in and identify the two or three things that they could do in the next 6-12 months to accelerate their movement towards that longer-term opportunity. This is important because it helps to focus participants within each cell on what they can do to act now and begin to learn from the impact that they achieve. Without this zoom in focus, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by such a big, long-term opportunity. And, the sooner participants in each cell can begin to see impact from their efforts, the more they will be motivated to put even more effort into evolving their approaches in their quest to achieve even more impact and to learn from their actions.

Bottom line                                                                                                                                                                                   If we’re not learning faster, we’re going to be increasingly marginalized in the Big Shift. The most powerful learning is in the form of creating new knowledge. To accelerate that kind of learning, we need to find ways to harness the power of opportunity-based narratives. The power of these narratives can be augmented by creation spaces and a zoom out/zoom in approach that helps to strengthen the commitment of participants. If we get this right, we can watch learning go exponential and create value in ways that would have been unimaginable with more traditional models of learning.

The Paradox of Connection

We are becoming more connected with each other and less connected with each other at the same time. The Big Shift that we're experiencing on a global scale is full of paradox – this is just one of many, but a particularly important paradox to acknowledge and address.

Let’s explore the forces that are shaping both dimensions of the paradox.

More connection.

We're seeing the exponential growth of a broad range of digital technologies that are connecting us globally at a speed and scale that would have been unimaginable a few decades ago. The foundation is a digital infrastructure that is exponentially improving in terms of processing power, storage capability and transmission speed. Wireless technology has made it possible for us to connect to this digital infrastructure (and to each other) regardless of where we are in the world with much less expense and effort.

Translation technologies are making it easier and easier for us to communicate with each other even if we don’t speak the same language. Tracking technologies can monitor our movements and activities and provide real-time updates regarding our whereabouts without requiring any effort on our part. And, of course, social media makes it possible for us to share news about ourselves to a large and growing number of friend, acquaintances and followers.

And it’s not just technology that’s expanding the ability to connect. There’s a global and accelerating movement of our population into densely settled cities. It’s far easier to connect with more people if you are in a city than if you are living in some small village in the countryside.

Less connection.

Many observers have commented that the exponentially expanding array of connections tends to become overwhelming. We find ourselves spread so thinly across so many connections that we can rapidly lose the ability to deepen our relationships with anyone.

And we don’t just have the ability to connect with more and more people, we also have the ability to connect with more information and resources through online networks. It used to be that if we had a question, we would have to find someone to ask. Now we can just go online and use a search tool to find the information on some website. That reduces our need to connect with others with urgent and pressing questions.

These factors are definitely in play, but I suspect that there’s something much more fundamental driving the erosion of connection. I suspect that fear is a growing factor in weakening our connections. I’ve written in an earlier post about the growth of fear around the world. Many forces feed the fear, but I believe there are two fundamental ones: mounting performance pressure and the accelerating pace of change. Either one of those alone would have the potential to generate fear but the combination of the two surely draws out this emotion.

So, what does fear have to do with connection? One might assume that growing fear would deepen connection as we are motivated to seek the support and comfort of others, but there are several barriers to deepening those connections. First, we live in institutions and societies where expressing fear is generally viewed as a sign of weakness. For this reason, we tend to try to hide and suppress our fear rather than expressing it and seeking the help of others. Instead, we try to maintain our distance so that few, if any, others will see our fear.

Fear also tends to erode trust. If I’m afraid, you may seem like a nice person, but I am less and less willing to trust my perceptions or to trust you. If I don’t trust you, I am even less willing to share emotions that might be perceived as a sign of weakness. This becomes a vicious cycle, because the less willing I am to share my emotions, the less willing others are to trust me and the less willing I will be to trust them in return.

As fear grows and trust erodes, there’s often a tendency to resort to narcissistic behavior. We see this a lot on social media, especially among the younger generations. They are prolific in posting pictures of the great meals they are eating, the wonderful places they are visiting and the large group of friends they are meeting. They want to assure everyone that they’re having a great time and that they are doing very well – they don’t want anyone to worry about them. In fact, they hope that everyone will envy them. Of course, this behavior further erodes trust because we all know that life is full of ups and downs. If we’re only sharing the ups, then we must be hiding the downs, and that makes us less trustworthy. Trust ultimately requires a willingness to express vulnerability, especially in times of mounting performance pressure and rapid change.

The net result of this is that our connections with others become thinner and more fragile. So, it’s not just about the challenge of juggling more connections; it’s about our willingness and ability to support deeper connections in an environment of growing fear and eroding trust. Until we address that, we’ll never be able to reap the benefits of more connections.

What is to be done?

The first step is to acknowledge that we are living in a world of growing fear and eroding trust. Then the question becomes what to do about it? How do we help people to overcome their fear and rebuild trust in each other?

It won’t be easy, but I’ve come to believe that a specific form of narratives can play a key role. As many of you know, I've written extensively about narratives, including here and here. I draw a distinction between stories and narratives, even though most people use these two terms to mean the same thing. In short, the distinction I make is that stories are self-contained – they have a beginning, middle and end - something happens to end the story. Stories are also typically about the story-teller or about some other people, either real or fictional, but they’re not about you.

In contrast, narratives are open-ended. There is some big opportunity or threat out in the future and it’s not yet clear how the narrative will be resolved. And the resolution of the narrative hinges upon you, the listener – it is a call to action declaring that your choices and your actions will help to resolve the narrative.

And there’s a big distinction between threat-based narratives and opportunity-based narratives. Threat-based narratives tend to generate and strengthen fear – we’re under attack and we’re going to lose everything if we don’t mobilize now and resist. Opportunity-based narratives, in contrast, tend to generate hope and excitement – we can accomplish some amazing things that will benefit us all if we come together and act together.

Unfortunately, we live in a world that is increasingly dominated by threat-based narratives. What’s missing are opportunity-based narratives that could help us overcome our fear and build deeper trust in each other as we come together to address some inspiring opportunities. These opportunity-based narratives also have the power of pull because they attract people who are inspired by the opportunity, even though we had no prior connection with these people. Powerful network effects take hold as word of mouth spreads and more and more participants share their excitement with others they know. Narratives have the potential to drive a deep sense of connection across a growing number of participants that can reach thousands and even millions of people – they are all united by a shared desire to achieve an inspiring opportunity.

Appropriately framed, opportunity-based narratives can become a catalyst for drawing out the passion of the explorer among the participants. Again, I’ve written about this specific form of passion a lot, including here and here. In this context, passion of the explorer is particularly powerful because it motivates people to connect in a much deeper manner. People with this form of passion will readily ask for help from others because they are driven to achieve more and more impact in their chosen domains. They’re willing to express vulnerability and acknowledge that they don’t have all the answers and resources they need, which in turn helps to build trust. They’re driven to connect with many others because they are constantly searching for better and better ways to address the challenges they’re facing.

Opportunity based narratives and passion are valuable on multiple dimensions but, in the end, they help people to develop a sense of agency, cultivate a motivation to come together, and build deep, trust-based relationships with each other. Narratives and passion help people to overcome a sense of hopelessness and helplessness and they strengthen a sense that people can and should make a difference through action. They also underscore that, no matter how smart or accomplished a person is, they will be able to achieve far more impact if they come together and act together than if they act in isolation. Finally, they drive people to ask for help from each other in ways that build a deep sense of trust and strengthen the sense of connection.

The bottom line.

We have the ability to connect with more and more people around the world, but our emotions are undermining our ability to make deeper and more fulfilling connections that can help all of us to achieve more of our potential. There’s a vicious cycle under way that continues to erode our ability to make connections that matter – the more fear we feel, the less likely we are to trust others and that leads to a growing sense of isolation which in turn feeds the fear, leading to even less trust and the cycle continues. While this emotion is understandable, it's preventing us from harnessing the potential that's created by the ability to connect with others more broadly and more deeply. We need to embrace opportunity-based narratives and the passion of the explorer to turn this around and, for the first time, discover the enormous power that comes from broader and deeper connections.