INTRODUCTION

Introduction to the four petals

So‌ ‌many‌ ‌things‌ ‌have‌ ‌changed‌ ‌in‌ ‌the‌ ‌past‌ ‌few‌ ‌years‌ ‌: ‌those‌ ‌of‌ ‌us‌ ‌who‌ ‌are‌ ‌not‌ ‌millennials‌ ‌cannot‌ ‌recognize‌ ‌the‌ ‌world‌ ‌of‌ ‌our‌ ‌childhood.‌ ‌I‌ ‌remember‌ ‌my‌ ‌parents‌ ‌describing their‌ younger years, which took place well before World War II. Their lives did not involve television, a telephone in every home or omnipresent cars: all elements that defined mine.‌ ‌Sometimes reflect on ‌the‌ ‌disconnect‌ they have felt ‌between‌ ‌the‌ ‌environment‌ ‌in‌ ‌which‌ ‌they‌ ‌grew‌ ‌up‌ ‌and‌ ‌the‌ ‌one‌ ‌in‌ ‌which‌ ‌they‌ ‌lived‌ most of their ‌adult‌ ‌life. ‌ ‌Until a few‌ ‌years‌ ‌ago,‌ ‌I‌ believed I had experienced fewer changes in my life than ‌they ‌did., I also felt that the transitions they experienced were amplified by the fact that ‌they‌ were born ‌in a rural ‌area‌ ‌in‌ ‌northern‌ ‌Italy‌ and moved ‌to‌ ‌live ‌in mid to large Italian and international cities where they raise my sister and me. Having turned 60, I am now quite far from my early years, and I am not that sure anymore.‌

Obviously, one of the most notable changes I have witnessed is related to how we communicate and exchange information and the rate at which we do so. Technologies to process and transfer information have changed how we plan and manage our organizations. Moreover, technology’s impact is likely to accelerate further in the years ahead. In this book, I will try to reflect on some critical drivers of change within organizations. They are not necessarily restricted to innovation in information technology, but are often related to or enabled by it. I will also elaborate on some approaches that someone may find helpful to experiment with. The pace, the intensity, and the instruments of change will not be the same everywhere around the world or within all economic sectors. Every specific situation will require contextualization.

To understand the evolution of a given organization, the more important aspect to consider is the intentions of the individuals that compose it and the stakeholders that revolve around it. The approaches and techniques discussed in the following chapters will appeal to those who believe that one cannot change a system without transforming first oneself. Intentions will determine the matters toward which they will direct their attention and therefore drive the organization’s evolution. In that respect, the notion of consciousness will be one of the significant threads through most of the sections that follow. Along with Agility, Complexity and Digital Transformation, Consciousness represents one of the four petals of the peaceful Organizational Revolution unfolding before us.

Why the petals and the revolution? Because significant, disruptive changes can bring positive and negative impact. If you see a young plant germinating, you cannot know if it is a weed or a beautiful flower. I hope that the approaches presented here will help create environments within our organizations where diversity, inclusivity, and performance can flourish.

Let’s start by looking at how the power of information shakes the very foundations of our societies.

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Techplomacy and the demise of the nation state E

If you follow the world news you will have noticed that traditional organizations and institutions are facing a decline in popularity and trust among public opinion in many countries. There is an obvious trend of political support shifting away from traditional parties, but the trend is actually deeper than a random oscillation of public opinion and is rooted in societal and epochal changes.

Take for example the concept of Nation State, born out of the American and French revolutions of the late 18th century, that over the past 200 years has been the cornerstone of the World Order and the guardian of the rule of law. On one hand the concept of Nation State seems increasingly popular worldwide with a record number of states existing on the planet, following the collapse of the USSR and Yugoslavia. On the other hand, globalization and digitization have created multinational actors whose economic power exceeds the one of small states. Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook speaks face-to-face with the political institutions of the United States or the European community. If Google was a country, it would rank 70th in GDP (Investopedia 2015). While there are companies that are even wealthier, Google example is particularly relevant. Not only because it was created from scratch only 30 years ago, exposing the speed of change that the digital world can impose on our society, but even more because it runs a business totally digitized and globalized and therefore particularly challenging for traditional nation states to control and regulate. In the last few years the European Union adopted a new set of regulations to protect the data privacy of its citizens : none of its member Nation States would have the economic clout to impose regulation on Google or any of the mighty GAFAM (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Alibaba,Microsoft).

The political relevance of global tech giants has been formalized by Denmark’s decision in 2017 to nominate (“Introducing TechPlomacy - American-Danish Business Council” 2018) a tech ambassador with the mandate “to engage in dialogue and collaboration on a broad range of topics with the tech-industry.”(Office of Denmark’s Tech Ambassador n.d.) and offices in Silicon Valley and Beijing. In the words of the ambassador himself : “In this age, a select number of highly successful multinational tech companies have become extremely influential – to the extent that their economic and political influence match or surpass that of our traditional partners, the nation-states” (Foremski 2019).

One of the most controversial aspects of the TTIP ( Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership) negotiations between Europe and the US was the ‘corporate court’ system that was to allow multinational corporations and other foreign ‘investors’ to sue governments for enacting regulation which damage their profits.

The TTIP negotiations, started in 2013 and ended inconclusively in 2016, have been declared no longer relevant by a council decision in 2019 (“TTIP - The EU-US Trade Deal” n.d.), but how long will it be before GAFAM officially surge to a political level equivalent to nations?

With political clout added to Artificial Intelligence, Big Data and pervasive gadgets connected to the internet, GAFAM and their successors will wield an unchallenged power to shape our societies, and it is definitely not too soon for each of us to, as a minimum, start reflecting about the future we would like to have for us and our children.

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Managing complexity

To manage complexity, we need first to understand it, or at least define it, and understand where it comes from.

Defining complexity

A vital property of a complex system is not the difficulty of understanding it but the difficulty of predicting how it evolves. A good starting point to define complexity is looking at how it differs from complication. A mechanical clock is an example of a complicated piece of equipment. Building one requires excellent skills, a lot of time and very focused attention. Its behaviour, on the other hand, is very predictable. Relying on its predictability is actually the whole point of having a high-precision watch.

Quite differently, a dish of spaghetti is straightforward to describe and prepare: anyone can do it. Predicting the position of each spaghetto in the bowl, however, is no easy task. It would require a powerful computer running and advanced simulation program and exact knowledge of the position of each spaghetto before you toss them¹.

In other words, complexity is not related to the difficulty to build or describe a system: an elementary system can display an extraordinarily unpredictable and complex behaviour. As shown in the figure, consider a pendulum, constituted by a rod free to rotate at one tip. The pendulum behaviour is fully described by the angle of the rod. The free end is constrained to be on the circumference defined by the length of the rod. For small oscillations, a simple formula available in an introductory textbook to classical mechanics describes the movement in terms of the mass and size of the rod and the gravitational pull at its location. For large oscillations, it’s a bit more complicated, but classical mechanics can sort it out quite simply. There is, however, always a difference between a theoretical model and reality. Imagine that you build such a pendulum and want to predict its position given an initial starting point. You just need to use the classical formula and plug in your length, weight, and gravitational pull values. Of course, you are bound to make errors in the measurements, resulting in errors in the calculated position of the pendulum versus the actual one. Reality will, however, not be way off your calculation. A small mistake in the measurement will result in a small error in the calculated position. Suppose your estimate of the initial starting point is a bit off. In that case, the actual amplitude and period of the pendulum oscillation will be somehow different than calculated but still relatively close.

Now let’s make just a little, simple addition to the set-up and add a second pendulum attached to the first. The double pendulum’s behaves in an infinitely more complex way than the regular one. The tip of the pendulum can be anywhere within the circle, not just on the circumference, and its actual position can vary significantly for minor variations of an initial starting point. Predicting the motion of a double pendulum is exceptionally challenging. Minor errors in the measurement of the length or the weight mean the pendulum may at a given time suddenly move to a position that is opposite to the one predicted.

The double pendulum is actually a textbook example in an introduction to chaos theory. It is a good, if simplistic, illustration of the challenges of managing complexity. Managing in a complex environment means that no matter how precise our assumptions are, the behaviour of the system we are interacting with can be astonishing. This type of chaotic behaviour gives rise to what is often called the butterfly effect: the flap of a butterfly’s wings in the Amazon can influence the weather in China. One possible implication for organizations is that managerial focus may have to move away from planning, command and control. It becomes crucial to sense and react quickly to emerging conditions and develop resilience to unexpected and unpredictable situations.

Currently, the worldview that we adopt to understand the surrounding environment, whether in economics or management, is heavily inspired by a classical explanation of the world. A deterministic, mechanical world where an action corresponds to a simple opposite reaction that has its roots in the works of Isaac Newton. This approach has proved highly effective for highly predictable systems, like the simple pendulum. Still, it tends to fail in real life when one adds just a single layer of complexity. The theory is still correct. It becomes impossible, in real life, to obtain the precise information that allows us to apply it. To manage in a complex world, we need a new worldview, one that considers the possibility that unexpected events emerge from the dynamic interaction of the different components of the system. We will see that modern physics can be the inspiration of this worldview like Newtonian Mechanics was the inspiration of the mechanistic worldview that is still predominant.

In the case of the double pendulum, complexity arises from the simple modification of adding another pendulum to the initial pendulum. In the rest of this book, we will explore the sources of complexity and start to design a worldview that can help us manage the complexity.

Do we live in a magical world?²

The disruptive change brought by technology, particularly by Information Technology, impacts global issues and our personal and professional lives. We may reach the point where we perceive that the world we live in is beyond our comprehension. Indeed, until a few years ago, people were used to dealing with objects that a human being could fully comprehend. They knew that a more knowledgeable person would explain if they could not understand a tool or a process personally. A good mechanic could take apart every piece of a car and build it back: not a very productive activity, but doable. A handy person with sufficient free time could erect a home from scratch: my neighbour did. This feeling of being in control would apply to the majority of items. Like a large boat or an aeroplane, some things would be far more complex, but it would be easy to identify the team of highly trained people in charge.

Today, each of us ordinarily relies on systems beyond the comprehension of a single human being (Arbesman 2014). When you use a Windows-based computer, you may not realize that the code that runs it, the Operating System, consists of some 50 million lines, not counting all the programs you loaded. If you wanted to read it, let alone understand it, it would take you almost five years at one line per second for 8 hours per day, without weekends or vacations. As of September 2015, Google code amounted to 2 billion lines, 50 times more than windows.(Metz 2015). The amount of knowledge embedded in daily appliances, from watches to mobile phones or cars, is beyond the comprehension of a single individual, no matter how educated or intelligent. It is almost like living in a fairy tale: things happen almost by magic, and no one can explain it to you to the last detail. We must have faith that it will work and, apart from the occasional glitch, sometimes dramatic, it regularly does. Going back to the parallel I was drawing with my parents, here is what summarizes best the main divide across our lives: given enough time, determination, and some knowledgeable friends, they knew that they could get a grasp of almost everything they handled while I can’t possibly do so.

In our modern society, we need an unprecedented level of trust to live our lives. If, for some reason, you lose faith in the network of experts, scientists, and engineers that design and run the systems we rely upon daily, your whole life loses its foundations. A reasonably sceptical person needs a solid education in science to understand and trust the processes behind generating the knowledge our lives rely upon: the scientific method relies heavily upon healthy scepticism. On the other hand, extreme scepticism without a solid technical and scientific background is dangerous and can be life-threatening for some. In February 2020, “Mad” Mike Hughes, 64, died when he crash-landed his steam-powered rocket (BBC News 2020): like many flat-earthers, Hughes could not trust centuries of scientific research and hoped to prove his theory by going to space. Conspiracy theorists of all sorts similarly put their lives and our ordinary social and political stability at risk every day.

Is the apparent magical essence of our world the reason fake news is so popular these days? Since one lives surrounded by what appears to be magic, it is hard to separate truth from fake. If everything is possible and happens by “magic” anyway, it is easy to fall deeply into the natural human tendency to believe in what one likes to be true. Moreover, if everything is possible and beyond comprehension, how can we distinguish a reliable expert from a wizard. The simplest thing is to believe the one who tells the story we like. Modern technology also accelerates this reinforcement of bad ideas; with a few clicks on the internet, we can easily find people who share our thoughts. Even more, the search algorithms will keep feeding us with the reinforcing message that like-minded people and organizations surround us. Maybe this explains the recent rise of populism and a strong argument for a dramatic increase in education and particularly science education worldwide, but this is another story.

Some healthy scepticism may indeed be helpful to make sense of our complex world. Complicated systems are reliable only if they are exact. We have seen that even a simple modification can turn a stable, easily predictable system into a complex one prone to chaotic behaviour. We live with the assumption that our world is fully described by advanced economic and intricate financial systems, like a perfect mechanical clock. We assume a mechanistic world-view inspired by the scientific and technical advances that made possible the First Industrial Revolution. Yet, the speed at which transactions run, the reaction loops between multiple actors interconnected through ever more complex systems may result in totally unexpected results. The 2008 financial crisis was primarily caused by ignoring the emerging effect of interrelated financial instruments under the illusion that the system was foolproof.

We may have reached a level of complexity where our assumption of the world being like a mechanical clock does not provide us with sufficient precision to avoid chaos. Our magic tricks may increasingly fail us

Our magic tricks may increasingly fail us. The climate crisis is a dramatic example of the consequences of ignoring the complexity of a system while trying to maximize just one parameter, in this case, production and wealth. A more comprehensive world-view is necessary to tackle the complexity that surrounds us.

How complex is your world ? ³

“Things are not how they used to be when I was young!”. We probably heard elders complain that the world around them changed so much that they struggle to figure it out. Facing relentless social and technological change, we may have a similar feeling ourselves. In the managerial world in particular, the current managerial generation believes it’s facing unprecedented challenges. A new term emerged a few years ago to qualify the present exceptional world: VUCA , (Volatile, Unstable, Complex and Ambiguous). However, no one can claim that a RIPO (Reliable, Immovable, Plain, Obvious ) world ever existed either.

In fact, management discourse has been describing the “present” as particularly challenging, especially when confronted with a presumptively stable past, and opening the way to impending unprecedented changes for a long time now. In “Beyond the hype: rediscovering the essence of management” (Eccles [1992] 1992, 20) Eccles pointed out that the mantra of the exceptional present has been sung at least since the early 1950s.

Maybe this is the reflection of humanity’s difficulty in adapting to the unrelenting technological changes it had to face since the invention of the wheel. One would imagine we got used to changing since a long time, and that by now an ever-changing world should be considered normal rather than exceptional. Or maybe it’s a smart negotiating position, to justify increasing managerial salaries because running a business in an exceptionally complex world requires unprecedented and scarce skills. Managing a modern corporation must indeed be the realm of pure geniuses since the annual compensation of the average S&P 500 CEO has grown to more than twice the money bestowed every year in recognition of their achievements on all the Nobel Prize winners. The extravagant pay of the world top CEO’s is another subject, and we will drop it.

Some believe that there is some truth in the statement and claim we are approaching a singularity in the history of humankind. Is the networked society, with new information technologies like Artificial Intelligence and Blockchain bringing to life the managerial revolution that has been announced since the middle of last century?

Understanding the complexity of our world

The previous section was about the difference between what is complicated and what is complex. Creating complications is, by definition, a difficult task, as in the case with a high precision mechanical watch. On the other hand, complexity can be generated swiftly, like cooking a dish of spaghetti or appending a second pendulum to an existing one. This does not mean that a complicated system is always predictable: especially in social interactions, intricated rules can easily result in contradictory consequences. Complexity, or chaos, occurs when very different outcomes happen in response to minor differences of a starting point. It’s the base of many gambling games: it is practically impossible to control the result of throwing dice or spinning the wheel of roulette.

Complexity and chaos emerge naturally from the web of relations of our lives. Gazing at my web of connections, friends, family, and professional ties, I see something that looks much more like a dish of spaghetti than a precise clock. To keep our lives manageable, though, we need stability and predictability. Most social constructs are built to satisfy this need to provide order and security. This results in elaborate organizations that aim at structuring our lives in predictable ways: governments, churches, armies, educational systems, tax systems etc.. The world-view behind the design of our economic and social system is built upon a mechanistic understanding of nature. An approach rooted in the great discoveries of classical physics, starting from the fundamental laws of Newton that offered an explanation to the most diverse phenomena in the universe, from an apple falling to the ground to remote planets orbiting around the sun. In this world-view, social relations and economics are explained as rational agents interacting to increase their utility. Organizations today, small and large, are designed as logical, regulated contraptions. Experts are sitting at the top to control the system through a carefully engineered chain of command. Yet, the very complication of our social constructs makes them fragile and prone to failure when confronted with the unexpected. Consider the collapse of the financial system during the subprime crisis or the debacle of the American and Nato armies in Afghanistan facing the Taliban.

Until a few years ago, we lived in a world where we had to deal with a clear and stable set of actors, unquestionably identified and well separated from each other. Take the telephone: It was common to have one telephone line per family when I was a kid. Moreover, telephone and communication suppliers were basically one and the same. Today, in developed countries, we own multiple lines, several mobiles within the family, each associated with its own subscription plan and giving access to additional channels like WhatsApp or Telegram. At the global level also things have been growing more convoluted. Nation-states used to have clear boundaries of their power. Those boundaries were occasionally crossed in war, but the state of war itself was clearly defined. Today nations interact in many, sometimes incoherent, bilateral and multilateral ways. Even war is not what it used to be. International conflicts are muddled by terrorism, cyber warfare or the weaponisation of migrants as experienced at the borders of the European Union. This is not to say today we are worse or better than in the past. The point is that the variety of players, at the global, social, and personal level and the interaction channels have increased dramatically. No matter how much we like to build a society that looks like a mechanical clock, reality increasingly looks like an entangled dish of spaghetti.

If you feel overwhelmed, you may find comfort in the knowledge that you are not alone. In the ’80s, at the end of the Cold War, US Army strategists had to face the disappearance of their traditional enemies. They described the new strategic situation as volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous: VUCA. The expression “VUCA world” was adopted by management consultants, speakers, thinkers, and writers worldwide. While the VUCA acronym was specific to the post-Cold War period, the feeling is recurrent. Since the fifties, management literature consistently described the “present” as more complicated than the past! Maybe we should conclude that change is pervasive in modern society, and we would be wise to accept and get accustomed to it. International crises and catastrophic events where one has to make quick decisions based on minimal and uncertain information are not new. Still, until the end of the Cold War, the strategic environment was relatively simple: the bad guys and the good guys were clearly identified. Whichever side you were on, you would have a definite vision of the good ( “you” and your friends) and the bad guys ( them and their friends). Since then, the number of actors has been growing dramatically. Multiple actors with various relationships make for a growing and changing number of connections. Understanding the environment becomes increasingly difficult as each player may shift its strategic focus and alliances form and dissolve continuously.

Does this mean there is no chance that our world will rise to the challenges it faces, particularly the climate emergency? Not necessarily, but, as shown in Glasgow’s COP 26, we should not rely on world bosses, political or corporate, to adopt the required long-term perspective. The former bet their careers on the upcoming electoral results and the latter on next quarter financial reports. Neither have the mind frame to tackle systemic issues that span decades ahead but require immediate action. Blaming those currently holding economic and political power is undoubtedly justified, but we should probably also look at ourselves. Maybe we should recognise that we are all part of the problem and therefore of the solution, and we can try to reinvent our lives.

To make sense of this complex world, maybe we need to adopt a world-view where agents are not so clearly separate from each other. They are entangled, and their boundaries are fuzzy: effects emerge in a non-linear way and are not predictable.

Even in a classical approach, you cannot predict the behaviour of a system from the conduct of its parts. Take Sodium ( Chemical symbol: Na), for example. Sodium is a volatile metal. As a high school student, one of my favourite pranks was to throw Sodium pieces in a puddle of water in front of a schoolmate. The Sodium would immediately react with water, inflame and explode, scaring the hell out of my victims. Consider Chlorine now. In minimal quantities, Chlorine can be used as a disinfectant or as a way to sanitize water. Chlorine can also be found in the form of highly poisonous gas. I swear that, as opposed to a former President of the United States, I have never ever inflicted a potentially lethal Chlorine-based prank on anyone. You would probably not dream of pouring liberal quantities of Sodium and or Chlorine in your mouth, right? We all actually do it every time we sprinkle salt on our plates. Culinary salt is basically the chemical composition of Sodium and Chlorine ( NaCl). It turns out that the exuberant and harmful properties of the parts transform into harmless, beneficial and actually tasteful properties of the system. Chemistry also offers plenty of opposite examples of harmless components that result in violent reactions when combined.

The world view inspired by classical physics cannot help us understand world trends emerging from the non-linear interactions of multiple agents. We need a more subtle worldview than picturing human beings as mechanical cogs in a piece of predictable machinery. Here, however, we walk a fine line. We say that anything is possible, and science cannot guarantee reliable predictions. In the case of climate science, for example, scientists do not offer firm estimates. They provide scenarios and probabilities of outcomes. When confronted with a confusing set of options and possibilities, one may be tempted to assume that everybody’s guess is just as good as solid scientific research. I suspect this reasoning is behind the dismissal of scientific opinion that is becoming common in the public debate. It also provides a fertile ground for all sorts of conspiracy theories or denials of evidence, from anti-vaxers to climate sceptics. In reality, science is well equipped to address complexity and chaos: it’s just not the science that was the base of the mechanical representation of the universe. The traditional worldview was inspired by classical physics. We will see how modern concepts like quantum physics can inspire a new worldview more fitting to understand current complexity.

Living in an exponential world

It only took a few years for tech giants like Google or Facebook to acquire an economic and political power that puts them on par with the highest authorities in the world. Their global role demonstrates how disruptive information technology can be on our societies’ social and economic fabrics and is not limited to impactingpractical aspects of our professional or personal lives. Today, companies that control the flow of information around the world pose a real challenge to traditional governmental institutions that are ill-prepared to deal with the knowledge economy. The European Union has recognized that some megacorporations can influence the competitive environment in business by abusing their market dominance. They can also affect social stability by tolerating or event promoting the diffusion of fake news. Legislation is being introduced to control such economic “gatekeepers”, defined as companies with a strong financial position, significant impact on the internal market and active in multiple EU countries (Stolton 2021; European Commission n.d.).

We can compare the social dominance of the Big Tech to the one of the Big Oil companies, another sector that rose to global power, with the difference that the oil economy required several decades to develop and reach world prominence. Moreover, while the oil economy plays a critical role in our lives, as consumers we still hold some form of control. We still rely heavily on oil & gas to heat our homes, power our transport systems and provide innumerable items, from tools to clothes. However, we can exercise choices and a growing number of consumers switch to renewable forms of energy or low emission transformation systems. By contrast, the information-based economy, let’s call it the Knowledge Economy, is much m more pervasive. It impacts the way we work, we shop, we communicate with our friends and family. Living a “digital free” life is becoming much more challenging that living a fossil fuel free life. Moreover, through the commoditazion of personal information we are ourselves being trasformed from consumers into products.

Not only does the knowledge economy have a profound impact on our lives, but it also introduces change at an increasingly frantic pace, meaning that the transformation it introduces are of an exponential type. Unfortunately we are not well equipped at understanding and coping with exponential behaviours. An old story illustrates how easily one can get fooled by something with an exponential pattern. Once upon a time, a bored king launched a contest to invent the most entertaining game. A sage won the competition by presenting the game of chess. The king was so enthusiastic about this new game that he allowed the winner to name its prize. The sage asked for rice as follows: one grain for the first square of his chessboard, two grains for the second, four for the third, and so on, doubling the grains for each of the 64 slots. The emperor initially thought that the request was ridiculously modest until he realized that there was not enough rice in the whole kingdom to satisfy it.

Often the exponential behaviour is exhibited in the time evolution of a given process, that starts very slowly and looks controllable, then suddenly accelerates and gets out of hands. The COVID pandemic is a typical example of this type of behaviour. Like the ancient king, the politicians in power couldn’t grasp the implication of an exponential event and almost unanimously failed to take the COVID-19 emergency seriously, and decide promptly on the necessary measures. Reacting just a few weeks sooner would not have stopped the pandemic, but at least saved thousands of lives.

We face a growing number of exponential behaviours, and we will see additional examples in the following sections. For the moment, let’s look at GDP, Gross Domestic Product: the figure below shows the world GDP over the last 2 millennia.

It started picking up with the First Industrial Revolution and shows the typical exponential behaviour that has been popularized by COVID-19 reports. Of course, wealth, and development have brought enormous benefits to humankind, and one would not compare them to a virus. Thanks to economic development, literacy rates, good health, life expectancy have never been so high throughout history. The problem is that GDP growth demands equivalent growth in energy production. The fossil-based energy mix used throughout the industrial revolutions implied growing emissions of greenhouse gases emissions, in particular C02.

Moreover, the link between the concentration of CO2 ( Carbon Dioxide) and temperature on the earth surface has been known since 1896, thanks to Eunice Foote, an American scientist and women’s rights campaigner(Dee 2021). In 1896 Arrhenius calculated that the human emissions of CO2 would eventually lead to global warming, connecting the final dots between economic growth and climate change(Wikipedia contributors 2021). Where he was wrong was in his calculation that it would take some centuries to reach a noticeable warming. He could not foresee the exponential behaviour of economic development.

The disturbing character of exponential trends, as dramatically demonstrated by COVID-19 and the challenge in curbing greenhouse gases emissions, is that you have little time to react if you want to control them and their effects. In most cases, if you wait for the problem to be evident before taking action, it is almost, or already, too late. Indeed, some scientists and activists started raising danger flags concerning the earth’s climatea few decades ago. On 21 March 1994, the UNFCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) was adopted to prevent “dangerous” human interference with the climate system(United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and Dowson 2019). Countries that signed the Convention gather in the famous COPs ( Conference of the Parties) every year to assess progress. 26 years after the first COP, world countries have thoroughly failed to curb the GHG emissions that are a direct consequence of the exponential economic growth at the foundation of our economies. Political and corporate bosses are overwhelmed by the combination of exponential growth and GHG emission as they were by the exponential spread of COVID-19. In this case, the long-term consequences will be way more devastating.

Blaming the world powers that be is easy, but I suspect most of us would perform just as poorly. After all, most of us share the same mechanistic world-view that worked so well to create the production and consumption society we live in, even if we dislike it. A mechanic-based world-view is not suited to harness the dynamic of exponential phenomena emerging in a complex web of interconnected actors. We need new approaches to understand the complexity around us and let new, innovative solutions emerge. It is difficult to be prescriptive in defining such new approach. Still, I am convinced that while technology cannot be ignored, we must complement it with consciousness, collective intelligence and agility to manage our companies, our careers, and our lives and contribute incrementally but intentionally to solve the challenges of our planet. In the following chapters, I will dive more deeply on sketching the elements of this approach.

The four petals

“Getting to zero will be the hardest thing people have ever done”, claims Bill Gates in a white paper about the investments and policies needed to get to net-zero as quickly as possible. (Gates 2021a). Gates believes that innovation is the only way the world can achieve the gargantuan task of cutting net greenhouse gas emissions from roughly 51bn tonnes per year to zero by 2050 (Gates 2021b). He advocates leveraging the large sums available for green development and incentivising projects such as sustainable aviation fuel and green steel to speed up the innovation cycle.

Innovative green technologies are definitely critical to achieving a net-zero emission economy. Researchers, however, have also pointed out that over-reliance on technological solutions may be too optimistic and actually slow down the rapid adoption of low tech solutions that are immediately available but require a change of lifestyles and values (Allwood 2021; Rau, Toker, and Howard 2010). (McLaren and Markusson 2020)(Sutoris 2021; Allwood )

The geopolitical confrontation between developed countries responsible for the bulk of the past emission and developing countries driving the current and future emissions conceals the social divide in carbon emission. The wealthiest 1% of the planet’s population generates as many emissions as the poorest 3.1 billion (Oxfam 2020a). Celebrities have a special responsibility in setting social norms, since “Wealthy people set the tone on consumption to which everybody aspires.” (Halina Szejnwald Brown, professor emerita of environmental science and policy at Clark University , quoted in Paddison n.d.). Unfortunately, celebrities have a high emission lifestyle, and there is only limited evidence that even those advocating for climate take personal action on mitigation (Gössling 2019). Bill Gates, for one, has produced in 2017 as many GHG emissions by flying as more than 100 average American citizens. It is not surprising that one advocates technological solutions to climate change when such solutions preserve a luxurious high-emitting lifestyle.

As stated by Ban Ki-moon, former Secretary-General of the United Nations“, our current economic model has been an enabler of catastrophic climate change and equally catastrophic inequality”(quoted in Oxfam 2020b). Ensuring the long term survival of our society in the face of climate change is likely to require more than brilliant technological development: we need new approaches to managing our companies, our careers, and our lives.

The good news is that the tools required to put this change in motion are already available, both at the personal and the organizational level. All we need to do is experiment with them, put them together, and ignite a small revolution in the way we live and work. The Swiss association Negawatt, for example, estimates that a strategy based on sobriety and efficiency can reduce the energy needs of Switzerland in 2050 by 40% compared to the official scenario of the government, making the zero-emission economy much more achievable (Moreau D., Ravalet E., Principi F 2021). Negawatt’s approach is not based on high tech innovation but on social innovation through simple measures like reducing by 2°c our homes’ temperature, limiting the time of our showers, using more the bicycle as means of transportation or optimising our living spaces.

While technically trivial and compatible with a lifestyle of abundance, the intentional adoption of the measures promoted by Negawatt is probably too revolutionary to expect their general adoption in a short time. Still, to build a society combining well-being, affluence, and sustainability, we need to redefine our picture of what a perfect world should look like.

The problem is that time is limited: a 2019 article by the BBC provocatively announced we have 18 months to save Earth (McGrath 2019). That time has expired, and the world economy in 2021 has established a record consumption of coal, the worst GHG gas emitter. When in a hurry, one needs to focus on areas where we can achieve results quickly, like ourselves or the organizations we can impact directly. This strategy may sound simplistic or naive, but it finds its inspiration in old wisdom. A Sufi poet of the XIII century once said :

“When I was young, I was smart, and I wanted to change the world. Now I am old and wise, and I want to change myself.”

In this book, I will concentrate mainly on how we work; that is why I speak of the Organizational Revolution. Organizational structures need to transform in response to the change that has already taken place and as a tool to trigger the change the world needs. However, as mentioned earlier, we cannot imagine changing the systems around us if we do not change ourselves. Most of the tools discussed in this book promote and require personal and organizational change that reinforce each other.

The first objection that one may raise concerns the actual impact one can exert on one’s immediate environment. It may feel overwhelming to intentionally embark on a journey to change the world, even if limited to that part of the world that immediately surrounds us. Clearly, the CEO of an SME will find it easier to start a change process to improve the competitive advantage of her company while resonating with her values. On the other hand, managerial responsibilities, the loneliness of the boss and a position that naturally flatters the ego may make personal change more difficult for someone in a position of power. Even if one is not at the top of the hierarchical ladder, there are ways to impact. If nothing else, by working for an organisation that embraces the need to change itself to change the world. Attracting talents that expect to work for organisations serious about their social and environmental responsibility is a significant driver for change, even in major corporations.

Technology, in particular Information technology, is already revolutionizing how we work. Suppose we want the digital transition to reflect more than just wealth accumulation. Then, we should leverage technology to understand how our organization interacts with the world around us. At the same time, in a rapidly changing world, organizations need to become more responsive by adopting agile ways of working, relying more on collective intelligence than the classical command and control structure.

I like to summarize the dimensions of change in what I call the four petals of the organizational revolution :

• Digital transition
• Organizational consciousness
• Collective intelligence
• Agility

The four petals are profoundly interrelated, and exploring them will shed light on organizational change in the years to come. A better understanding of the four petals will be advantageous if we want to leverage this organizational change to trigger an even more significant change at the societal level.

Brief Overview of the four petals

We must decarbonize our societies very rapidly to avoid environmental consequences that will be hurting at the social and economic level. At the same time, companies like fossil energy companies are the backbone of our economy and provide a livelihood to hundreds of thousands⁴. Their untimely demise would have immense social and economic repercussions. Moreover, they have amassed a tremendous capacity of execution, thanks to their relationships, financial might and accumulated knowledge. It would be not just challenging to fight them, but a terrible waste of resources needed to succeed in what should be a joint fight. The immense change required will be impossible if the economy is operated by the old paradigm, and profit is the only driver of a company strategy. Companies must integrate the consciousness of being part of a global system and their responsibility to contribute to putting this system back on track. This is the condition for successfully combining agility, digital innovation and collective participation to build a world of prosperity, sustainability, and equity.

This section covers a brief introduction to each of the 4 petals that will be then discussed more in depth in separate chapters. We will see how these four petals interact to impact the way companies are structured and are managed as a way to make sense of today’s complex world. The complexity of the situation is rooted in the fact that all four elements are interconnected.

Digital transition

Digital transition impacts not only the production of goods or the delivery of services but the way we work, how we interact with our colleagues, how we relate to the companies we work for and also the way we make decisions and the way companies and organizations are structured. Innovation in the digital world is constant and difficult to forecast. It is not easy to single out specific technologies that may play a predominant role in the future. In our area of interest, we can, however, identify 6 technological themes that are likely to play a particularly interesting role in transforming the workplace in terms of organizational processes and governance. In some cases, they will also be the starting point of reflections that resonate particularly well with the need to redefine our world-view. The topics that we will explore in more detail in chapter 3 are :

• artificial intelligence
• blockchain
• internet of things
• robots
• virtual reality
• quantum computing

Consciousness

Sometimes I have the feeling that the world is becoming more ruthless and driven by a quest for power and money than ever. There is undoubtedly a concentration of wealth as never before: the world billionaires, 2153 individuals, own as much as the poorest 4.6 billion (“Time to Care | Oxfam International” 2020). The COVID pandemic produced 9 more billionaires, affording them a wealth that would be sufficient to vaccinate everyone in the world who cannot afford to. The fact that some of those billionaires eventually devote part of their wealth to charities is clearly a commendable way to give back to society. Still, it does not address the absurdity of a system that allows such extreme imbalance. Also, in the past few years, we have witnessed unbearable race and religious horror in many parts of the world. Even in the rich economies, the clock has been ticking backwards, with the growth of populism has set social and political agendas backwards in several countries.

Looking at the bigger picture, though, things are not that bad. Death by war, as a percentage of world population, has decreased steadily since World War II and is actually at an historic low (Beauchamp 2015). Europe, under the auspices of the European Union, has experienced the longest war-free period within its members since the Pax Romana. Moreover, the last few decades witnessed the emergence of a grassroots movement fuelled by the growing feeling of belonging to the same world and sharing the responsibility for protecting it for the benefit of future generations. The rise of civil society since the 1980’s has materialized in the boom of the NGO sector (Lewis 2010; Beloe and Elkington, n.d.; Paul n.d.).

A growing number of people around the world are developing a more profound awareness of how individual and collective actions impact the world in which we live at many levels. This is reflected in many ways, from consumer choices to corporate commitments towards diversity and social and environmental responsibility. While often, businesses only pay lip service to issues beyond maximizing shareholders returns, the trend is real and is having a tangible impact. In a leap of optimism, I am willing to hope that the rise of populism, intolerance and fundamentalism are a form of last ditch resistance of old mind frames to the ineluctable progress of humankind and the shared consciousness that needs to drive our actions in the coming years.

In opposition to this notion of consciousness in our actions, classical economic theory tends to exonerate us from assuming responsibility for the consequences of our decisions. As rational economic actors, we are supposed to optimize our utility and trust the market’s natural tendency to achieve optimum equilibrium and maximize well-being for all.

Consciousness, rather than individual or corporate utility maximization, can be a driver of our organizations, and can open the way to a different way of life. Already major corrections are being implemented to tame the effects of a pure market drive economy like Ethical finance is or carbon pricing.

Complexity

Technology allows us to work more efficiently and be more productive as individuals. Furthermore, it promotes collaboration within teams, organizations, and across distances. The lockdown created by the COVID-19 pandemic has lifted many doubts over remote working, forcing many to realize it is a viable alternative to office commute. This, in turn, is likely to boost the collaborative economy and all applications that rely extensively on peer exchange and specifically on collective intelligence. As mentioned before, collaborative and shared economy can be key aspect of a decarbonizing strategy.

From the organizational perspective, complexity can have an external and internal feature. Externally, an organization has to interact with an ever-changing network of actors. Linear thinking is not appropriate to adaptive strategies that work well in a multisatkeholders environment. New ways to map the social and economic environment are needed

Complexity can also be seen ar the source for the emergence of collective intelligence. The notion of collective intelligence, sometimes referred to as the wisdom of the crowd, can be traced back to Condorcet and his jury theorem. Condorcet’s considered a group of people that needs to vote on a given issue assuming that each individual member of the group is more likely than not to make the right decision. He realized that the probability that the vote results in the right choice grows with the number of participants in the group. (Wikipedia contributors 2020). This can be the base of many collaborative applications in today’s economy. For example, you can plan your holiday using a guide compiled by a knowledgeable expert , or rely on the wisdom of the crowd and follow the recommendation of fellow tourists in TripAdvisor.

Forms of shared control and feedback relying on collective opinion are the backbone of the collaborative or peer to peer economy. This may take the form of crowdsourcing, where disconnected individuals participate in the same project through platforms that allow extended collaboration and in general, is at the origin of new flexible ways of working. A whole economy, sometimes also called the Shared Economy, is being developed around the notion of shared information. This model is gaining importance every day and is challenging established economic sectors like Uber for highly regulated taxi services or Airbnb for the established hospitality sector. These models are at the same time responding to the modern need for efficiency and flexibility while promoting the sharing of resources, an essential tool in a more sustainable economy. However, not everything is rosy with the collaborative economy. A disturbing aspect emerges when anonymous workers end up working for large dehumanized organizations, without the social protection granted to classical employees. This is sometimes referred to as the “uberization” of the economy.

Another disturbing side of the wisdom of the crowd is represented by the phenomenon of fake news spreading in an uncontrolled way even for the most absurd conspiracy theories like chemical trails or flat earth.

Agility

Faced with the increased pace of societal transformation, companies need to find new, more efficient ways to respond to external inputs and rapid changes in the market. This also means redesigning the way organizations are structured, inventing new approaches to devising business models , strategies and governance processes that build upon the internal collective intelligence and are inclusive of all stakeholders.

We are witnessing an acceleration of a trend that has been taking place for a long time of reducing managerial layers. A growing number of enterprises look for inspiration in the agile approach, initially born in the software industry. Agility promotes new, flexible ways to involve customers and employees in the design and delivery of innovative products and services. Some pioneering organizations push this even further. They promote the creation of entirely new organizational forms that, in the most radical approach, replace the classical command and control hierarchical chain with ground-up managerial methods.

Today’s organizations have a fine line to walk between tapping into the richness of the collective intelligence and the flexibility of the collaborative economy. The challenge will be to create work environments that are respectful of workers that are increasingly independent and disconnected, while remaining conducive to personal fulfilment rather than exploitation.

Notes

INNOVATION

On the shoulders of giants

Diffusion of innovation

#DIGITAL TRANSITION

Artificial intelligence

A brief history of AI

Data Science , Ai and other

Artificial intelligence vs Collective intelligence

BlockChain and cryptocurrencies

Cryptography

How blockchain works

Impact of blockchain

Quantum Computing

Some physics concepts

How does a quantum computer works

A quantum based worldview

Diffusion of digital innovation

#Consciousness

The growth of consciousness

The emergence of the conscious consumer

The importance of consciousness

What is consciousness

Stages of Organizational Consciousness

Consciousness and evolution

Quantum physics and consciousness

Diffusion of consciousness in organizations

Complexity

The collaborative economy

Networks of complex heterogeneous actors

Quantum theory and decision making

Agility

The Agile movement

Future of work

Why old managerial models are not fit

Co-responsible leadership

What is next?

The 4 quadrants

Understanding the individual

Personal leadership

Rearranging the organization inside

Promoting Co-responsible leadership

TRIMA for co-responsible leadership model

Multistakeholder governance, the fair share model

Understanding the world outside

Conclusion

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