Dave Gray's book

TED

Charles Jennings

The 21st Century: Analysis and Definitions
Are You Ready For The 21st Century ?

February 2009
A Future in Crisis

Intuitively, people everywhere are now sensing that they are living on credit … borrowing from the future in terms of the economy, the environment and sources of energy. People from all walks of life are beginning to realize they are borrowing from an uncertain future to finance current levels of prosperity. It's becoming clearer and clearer that the current models for society are mortgaging the quality of life from future generations in order to fulfill current desires.

Thus, mental models are beginning to change, and people don't want a range of disparate studies on various disconnected problems; rather, they are seeking concrete analyses and approaches that can help redirect or remedy difficult and complex situations.

This section of the web site offers readers a framework that explores some new mechanisms for addressing the complexities of the emergent post-industrial society.

Three diagrams that synthesize the issues and causes of the current transformations



We need to better identify the transition taking us from an industrial to a post-industrial society if we want to make effective use of the tools that can help us better manage the new complexity.

Here are one hundred events which define the turbulent period we have experienced from 1980 to 2009. In this 30-year period we have watched the societal rupture that we are currently living through develop from a range of causative factors. The list of events is accompanied by a list of one hundred researchers and authors who are the witnesses to these events and whom we have cited in this document.

We can better understand the changes we are seeing and feeling if we analyze the activities through three filters : a technological dimension, an economic dimension and a societal dimension.

Even though most large corporations have a training and development function they are always somewhere on the periphery.   For employees, managers and executives alike, training and development is looked on as a nice to have luxury and not as an essential tool of business strategy execution. The general belief is that it helps individuals get better, not the organization as a whole.

In the American and many other Western cultural contexts, individuals are supposed to develop themselves and take responsibility for their own career advancement.  The firm has little responsibility to develop employees, relying on the competitive nature of employment and learned self-sufficiency to provide any needed skills.  Individual employees as well as managers operate under the belief system that those who take the initiative to learn will and should get promoted.  However, reality is often very different with personal prejudices and organizational politics dictating more promotions than merit.

Most corporate learning remains traditional, formal, and follows patterns laid down decades ago by firms such as GE and IBM. While it is hard to fault the content of these programs, as they are usually generic and seem to make sense; there is also little evidence that they make a huge difference to profits, success, or productivity. It is much easier to show that a quality program or a process improvement initiative have more impact than a learning program.

Formal classes and training programs are still the mainstay of corporate learning functions. Instructional designers and professional presenters spend thousands of hours designing training that should, in theory, transfer the needed skills to leaners as fast as possible. Unfortunately there is little evidence that these classes work very well.

Apple's vision is centered on its strengths in design and in creating simple user interfaces.  By using this common vision and focusing on it strengths, Apple has moved from being a computer company to one where it produces a variety of products and services from software and a music stores to telephones and iPads. Rather than remain a computer company only, Apple has learned to expand its vision and think bigger.

The adaptive organisation is the second-last chapter of Adapt: Why success always starts with failure, followed by Adapting and you. In the final chapters, Tim Hartford examines how groups and individuals can strive to adapt, and here are some highlights.

"So let's first acknowledge a crucial difference: individuals, unlike populations, can succeed without adapting." This statement explains a lot about what happens in organizations ;)

Case study of Timpson:

The first thing Timpson does when it buys another business is to rip out the electronic point-of-sale machines (there are always EPOS machines) and replace them with old-fashioned cash registers. 'EPOS lets people at head office run the business', explains John Timpson. 'I don't want them to run the business.' EPOS machines empower head offices but they make it harder to be flexible and give customers what they need.

conversations about change

Jay's research page

Guy orders pizza for delivery at Apple Store, then brings his goat. Talk about exceeding expectations!

Thoughts on Recruiting, Learning and Other Things as I Ramble around the World
Are Senge's Five Disciplines Still Relevant? Kevin Wheeler's blog.

time as a metric

To be successful and truly collaborative, knowledge-sharing systems require intuitive tools that connect people, reward participation, and align well with existing work and communication patterns. After IDEO's two-year internal development effort to create and implement "the Tube," their enterprise-wide intranet system, we gained new understanding and experience in balancing technology possibilities with behavior realities. The unique success of the Tube comes from the insight that effective knowledge sharing is a social activity that is enabled by technology, rather than a technological solution bolted onto an existing work culture. Now IDEO's Knowledge Sharing Team shares a set of design principles for building online collaboration systems that really work.