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2025: The Coming Realignment | Digital Tonto
In 1989, just before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama published an essay in the journal The National Interest entitled The End of History, which led to a bestselling book. Many took his argument to mean that, with the defeat of communism, US-style liberal democracy had emerged as the only viable way of organizing a society. He was misunderstood. Fukuyama pointed out that even if we had reached an endpoint in the debate about ideologies, there would still be conflict because of people’s need to express their identity. What many thought to be a justification, was actually a warning to expect people to rebel against order imposed on them from outside their communities. I began to better understand this when I went to live in Moscow for a time in 2003. It was my view, as it was of most Americans, that we had won the Cold war. In Poland, where I had lived for six years, people felt similarly. Yet Russians felt otherwise. In their view, they had not lost, but had been betrayed by Gorbachev. “This must have been what Weimar Germany must have felt like,” I remember thinking. “They are biding their time, plotting their return.” The truth is that every revolution inspires its own counterrevolution and the pendulum will continue to swing until there can be some agreement about shared values and how to move forward. Lasting change is always built on common ground and there is precious little of that in this particular moment. Even the lines defining the battle are just now being drawn. We won the Cold War not because we were able to overpower, but because we could attract. Nobody ever truly capitulates, not really. The human need for status and identity are too strong for that. They may surrender and retreat, but they will always be plotting their return. The forces of discontinuity will continue to prevail, until the forces of continuity are able to build strength, and are ready to take over. The future will be shaped by choices we make—or don’t make. While many of these decisions will revolve around technology and economics, both are ultimately shaped by deeper questions about who we are and who we aspire to become. That’s why dominance will always be fleeting. Until we make our minds up about our identity and aspirations, conflict will continue. As Josep Borrell put it, “It’s the identity, stupid.
3 Types Of Change Problems (And How To Solve Them) | Digital Tonto
People love to quote the pre-socratic Greek philosopher Heraclitus about change. Yet pithy aphorisms like "Change is the only constant" and "You cannot step into the same river twice," are popular because they are so imprecise. They point to, as Kafka put it, “some fabulous yonder, something unknown to us, something too that he cannot designate more precisely, and therefore cannot help us here in the very least.” Every change effort represents a problem, or set of problems, to be solved. A strategic shift starts at the top and needs effective communication and coordination for everybody to play their role. To build high performing teams, individual managers need to help and empower their people to adopt new skills and practices, see blind spots and kill bad habits. Yet often the most important changes involve collective action, which can be maddeningly complex. People adopt things when they see others around them adopt them. Success begets more success, just as failure begets more failure. Big communication campaigns can ignite early resistance and backfire. Individual efforts don’t scale. For collective action problems, we need to focus on, as network science pioneer Duncan Watts put it to me, “easily influenced people influencing other easily influenced people.” You build momentum and reach critical mass not through persuasion, but by empowering early adopters and helping them to build connections with others. To be an effective change leader, you can’t take a one-size fits all approach.. Solutions need to fit the problem, not the other way around. There is no silver bullet.
How AI Can Help You Make Better Decisions | Digital Tonto
Clearly, we are on the verge of something very different. Individual firms are investing tens of billions of dollars to create AI systems that will bring us every fact ever uncovered, every story ever told, every language ever recorded; all human knowledge at our beck and call. This has the potential to give our rational brain unprecedented power. What it can’t do is replace our innate capacity to wonder and explore. The knowledge of the world is finite, but the universe of possibility is limitless. Our emotional brain, driven by somatic markers in our limbic system from personal experiences, fuels our ability to form intent. An AI system can help us to discern facts, but only we can determine what truly matters and decide the paths we want to pursue. It is through forming intent that we can begin to leverage AI to explore. We can, as Warren Berger suggested in A More Beautiful Question, ask our systems questions such as “Why?” “What if” and “How?” That can lead us to new territory where we can create new knowledge, tell new stories and spark new conversations. AI systems are exceptional at analyzing the past, but they can’t envision a completely different future, much less determine what we want from it. They can inform our decisions by helping us discern baseline knowledge, but only we can decide what possibilities we want to explore and whether, when we examine them, they are to our liking. As we embark on this new era of augmented cognitive capacity, we need to learn to collaborate effectively with intelligent machines. We will have far greater power to inform our decisions, but we will still have to make our own.
Experian Was Being Disrupted by Fintech Startups. Then They Turned the Tables | Digital Tonto
As Robert Gordon explains in "The Rise and Fall of American Growth", the turn of the 20th century was a time of great change. New innovations like electricity, indoor plumbing and the automobile were changing the way people lived, worked and shopped. New supermarkets and department stores were edging out the old corner markets and dry goods dealers. While this created great opportunities, it also created problems. Merchants needed to extend credit no longer knew their customers personally and so there was a great need to verify consumers’ trustworthiness. Experian built a great business being a trustworthy gatekeeper of data that helped those businesses evaluate the credit of hundreds of millions of people. Yet when its consumer business was disrupted by fintech startups, Jeff Softley saw that the same data and technology infrastructure the company had built to serve large enterprises, could also be put to work to empower consumers to improve their access to credit and measurably improve their lives. Somewhere along the line we got it into our heads that large firms can’t innovate and should strive to act like startups. The truth is that they are very different types of organizations and need to innovate differently. While large firms can’t move as fast, they have other advantages. Rather than try to act like startups, they need to leverage other assets. While it’s true that venture-backed startups have a lot of advantages, large enterprises also have deep expertise, proven technology and customer relationships they can put to work for them. You can’t innovate by copying your competitors. Good strategy is always a process of discovery, to identify a relative strength you can bring to bear against the relative weakness of your competition.