Edge Perspectives with John Hagel

Passion and Plasticity - The Neurobiology of Passion

What if you could evolve and shape your brain in ways that help you to get better faster? What if you could unleash a virtuous cycle that connects passion, practice and performance?  What if it is not just you who could do this, but a whole cohort of people who have figured out how to wire their brains to accelerate performance improvement and who are committed to working with you to get better faster together?

Before I dive any further into this, I should caution that I am going so far out on the edge this time that I may finally fall into the precipice below. If I show signs of slipping, I am sure that some of you will reach out and gently guide me back to a more secure part of the edge. This is definitely an exploratory post.

I’m a business guy, with a particular passion for business strategy, but I am ultimately driven by the quest for potential and possibility.  In that context, I have long had an interest in neurobiology and in particular the emerging insight that our brains have the potential to continually re-shape themselves – the geek term is “neuroplasticity”. What got me excited the other day was the possible connection between passion and plasticity. 

Passion and dispositions

There are many different forms of passion.  My particular interest is in the passion of the explorer – a passion that takes the form of a long-term commitment to explore a particular domain, usually fairly broadly defined. It is not content with passive observation, but it wants to learn through doing. In the process, it seeks to achieve a growing impact on that domain by continuing to test and extend one’s own personal performance limits. 

I have increasingly focused on two key dispositions that define the passion of the explorer – a questing disposition and a connecting disposition.

A questing disposition continually seeks out new challenges to test and advance our capabilities.  People with this kind of disposition need continuing stimulation. But it is stimulation of a certain type – the kind that comes from going beyond one’s comfort zone, addressing new challenges, engaging in creative problem-solving and developing new skills to make progress in a challenging environment.

A connecting disposition, on the other hand, seeks to connect with others and form deep, trust-based relationships. For a passionate person, this is about continually reaching out to find people who share their passion or who might have some insights that can be helpful in pursuing their passion.  It is ultimately about a desire to learn from each other and to get better faster by working together.
The power of passion is that it brings these two dispositions together.  The relationships resulting from the connecting disposition help passionate people to more effectively set out on ever more challenging quests.  The quests in turn forge deep, trust-based relationships among those who jointly participate on a quest.

Two key neurotransmitters

So far, so good.  I’ve covered this ground before.  But here’s an interesting new link.  Two of the brain’s most powerful neurotransmitters – dopamine and oxytocin – map surprisingly well to the questing and connecting dispositions respectively. In fact, dopamine and oxytocin reward and reinforce the development of questing and connecting dispositions.

Let’s start with dopamine.  It is a neurotransmitter that performs many functions in the brain.  In this context, dopamine is associated with anticipation of rewards.  When we undertake a challenge and expect to overcome it, our brains release a surge of dopamine which gives us a sense of pleasure and helps to motivate us to pursue the anticipated reward. (Drugs like cocaine inhibit the reuptake of dopamine so we get more mileage from the dopamine in our brain - this helps to explain the intense feeling of pleasure that gives these drugs an addictive power.) If we achieve our expectations, dopamine helps us to feel elated and, conversely, if we fail to achieve our expectations, it makes us feel dejected.

As a result, dopamine stimulates exploratory/seeking behavior. It is much more tied to the anticipation of a reward than the actual attainment of the reward.  It makes us much more willing to embark on and remain committed to sustained initiatives that offer the expectation of rewards, even if the rewards are far from immediate.

Dopamine helps to alter the way we make risk/reward trade-offs, increasing our risk taking propensity.  It makes us much more willing to explore unfamiliar territory and try out new activities.

By now, the connection with quests becomes apparent.  Videogames become so quickly engaging for participants in part because game designers have figured out how to sequence quests so that early ones are relatively easy to accomplish and the expectation of future successes releases more and more dopamine, motivating participants to become more deeply immersed in the game and to engage in more and more challenging quests. Even if participants do not come into the game with a questing disposition, they often find themselves developing one as a result of the stimuli (both external and internal) that they encounter. There is a powerful reinforcing dynamic between videogames and brain chemistry. That same reinforcing dynamic plays out as passionate individuals pursue ever more challenging quests in real life.

Oxytocin has a different role to play.  It has a calming effect, reducing stress hormones whereas dopamine excites and stimulates. Oxytocin tends to dampen the parasympathetic reactions to stressful situations, making it easier to cope with stress.

Our brains release this hormone in a variety of situations – the most well known one being when the mother is in the presence of her child.  Oxytocin is released through touch and massage (giving it the nickname of the “cuddle chemical”) and it positively surges during sexual activity, especially at orgasm. More broadly, oxytocin appears to be produced through all forms of social interactions, including even potentially online social network activities.

Experimental tests suggest that oxytocin has a wide range of effects.  People with high levels of oxytocin tend to be more trusting, empathetic, and generous.  A powerful virtuous cycle appears to be set in motion by oxytocin – it is released through social and physical contact and in turn stimulates behaviors that tend to promote more social and physical contact.

Here, the link with a connecting disposition appears intriguing.  This oxytocin-induced virtuous cycle is exactly what would be required to nurture a connecting disposition – seeking out connections with others and building trust-based relationships with a broader and broader range of people.

Dopamine and oxytocin complement each other in interesting ways.  For example, dopamine release is associated with learning while oxytocin is associated with unlearning (often called the amnestic hormone, oxytocin helps us to wipe out learned behavior in part to help us adapt more readily to the approaches that others might take and foster deeper collaboration).  Dopamine encourages us to focus on more distant goals and territories, while oxytocin rewards closeness. Dopamine drives attraction, focusing attention, while oxytocin drives attachment, engaging attention. Dopamine and oxytocin both help us to become more extroverted than we might otherwise be, but dopamine encourages more utility-driven social contacts while oxytocin rewards deeper affiliations.

These (and other) neurotransmitters are receiving more and more attention in neurobiology. As the term “neurotransmitter” suggests, they play a critical role in stimulating the transmission of messages across the synapses of the brain.

The connection to neuroplasticity

So, what does this have to do with neuroplasticity? Well, the shaping of the brain critically depends on the selective strengthening of pathways across particular synapses and the progressive pruning of pathways across other synapses. "Neurons that fire together, wire together.” The brain over time evolves its wiring patterns.  It actually does this all the time as we process the sensory stimuli coming our way.  For example, people who listen to a lot of music have different wiring patterns in their brains than people who have not been exposed to a lot of music.

But it is not just about reacting to the sensory stimuli bombarding us on a daily basis.  Scientific research increasingly demonstrates that our brain wiring patterns can be significantly shaped by where we choose to focus our attention, particularly if we can sustain that focus over an extended period of time.  The example of Tibetan Buddhist monks who have displayed fundamentally different brain activity patterns as a result of years of meditation drives this point home.

This is where passion comes in, especially the passion of the explorer.  People with this form of passion make a sustained commitment to explore a particular domain, not simply for curiosity, but with the goal of making an increasing difference over time in that domain.  In a world of increasing distractions, their passion helps them to focus their attention.  The questing disposition associated with this passion continually seeks out new challenges and focuses attention even more finely on building the specific skills required to succeed in these quests. 

The dopamine release associated with these quests in turn helps to motivate individuals to stay true to their quest and to quickly seek out a new one as soon as the previous quest has been successfully concluded. Passion provides the initial catalyst for focus but dopamine rapidly kicks in to sustain attention on a progression of increasingly challenging quests within a particular domain.  The quests motivate people to engage with the domain – they are motivated to act, not simply to observe and reflect.  As a result of action in the domain, a host of sensory stimuli kick in to selectively develop certain areas of the brain.  For example, a car mechanic fine-tuning racing cars can hear and interpret the sounds that an engine makes in ways that most of us would find deeply mysterious.

As this passion takes shape, the connecting disposition also kicks in.  Passionate individuals actively seek out others who can help them in pursuing their passion and they quickly forge deep, trust-based relationships with these individuals.  Once again, passion provides the initial catalyst, but then oxytocin kicks in and provides rewarding feelings as these bonds get forged. It also makes it more natural for us to engage in the kinds of behavior that extend and deepen the bonds – trust, empathy and generosity.

But the end result is to steadily strengthen the brain to pursue the passion more and more effectively.  A powerful virtuous cycle begins to play out – the more effective our brains become at pursuing a particular passion, the more positive feedback we will feel from questing and connecting. The wiring of the brain will evolve in a distinctive way mapping to the particular passion in question.

The bottom line

Our brains are remarkably energy efficient organs.  Brains are plastic but they favor what they have experienced in the past as the tried and true.  It is why habits are so hard to break and why we instinctively resist going out of our comfort zones.  Without passion to provide the sustained focus of attention and dopamine and oxytocin to fuel and reward that passion, we will have a much harder time harnessing the enormous potential of neuroplasticity. 

There is in fact a biological link between passion and performance, a link forged by dopamine and oxytocin.  Our brains truly become biologically “hard-wired” in ways that make it increasingly difficult for others to replicate our performance. At the same time, the questing and connecting dispositions also provide safety valves to continually test and refine the neural hard-wiring against changing conditions in our environment.

Of course, we need to be careful about singling out two neurotransmitters and exploring their role in isolation.  If there is one thing we have learned from recent advances in biology, it is that reductionist approaches can only get us so far.  Witness the initial enthusiasm over the sequencing of the gene that has now been significantly tempered by the growing realization that our genes are only part of the puzzle. Proteomics and a host of other “-omics” have emerged to help us discern other parts of the puzzle. The brain is a classic example of a complex adaptive system that evolves within the even more complex adaptive system that is our body.

Yet, I cannot help but think that there is an interesting connection here that deserves to be explored in more depth.  I leave it to others much more expert than I am to either confirm this intuition or tell me where I have gone wrong. Is there in fact a neurobiology of passion?  If so, what are its constituents and the relationships that they weave together? Does passion in fact re-shape our brains in ways that make it harder and harder for those who lack this passion to compete with us?

Alone Together - An Important New Book by Sherry Turkle

Sherry Turkle has been on a journey. Sherry joined the faculty of MIT 30 years ago.  As a licensed clinical psychologist, she was, as she acknowledges, “a stranger in a strange land” (anyone making a Heinlein reference immediately wins my heart).

In 1984, she wrote her first book on computers and people, "The Second Self," in 1984, a book she describes as “full of hope and optimism.” Over time, her focus shifted from the one-to-one relationship between computer and individuals to the role that computers played in shaping relationships among people. Her second  book, "Life on the Screen", published in 1995, focused on  “the new opportunities for exploring identity online”. It applauded the space that online environments afforded for us, especially as youth, to experiment with our identities and in the process to define more fully our true identity.

Fifteen years later she has published a third book, “Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Computers and Less From Each Other”.  The title beautifully summarizes her growing concern that computers, rather than becoming catalysts for re-thinking identity, have seriously undermined our ability to connect in meaningful ways with each other.

The focus of "Alone Together"

This is a wonderful and thought-provoking book. It made me think in a way that few other recent books have.  It will no doubt stir up great controversy with the digerati. But it will hopefully provide all of us an opportunity to sit back and reflect on what many of us have given up as we rushed headlong into an embrace (increasingly in a literal sense) with the machines around us. The book is full of engaging stories and delightful turns of phrases that make the reader stop and think. 

Sherry’s goal is not just reflection, but to spark a conversation that will expand and sustain among all of us as we wrestle with the implications of the technology that increasingly shapes our lives. Ultimately, she hopes these conversations will prompt us to change our behavior, starting with small moves, in ways that help us nurture the many relationships that have frayed as we have become increasingly absorbed in the technology around us.

Sherry neatly summarizes her core thesis on the first page of her book:

Technology is seductive when what it offers meets our human vulnerabilities. And as it turns out, we are very vulnerable indeed. We are lonely but fearful of intimacy. . . . Our networked life allows us to hide from each other, even as we are tethered to each other. We’d rather text than talk.

Weaving narratives together

Sherry weaves together two narratives that play off each other in powerful ways.  As she relates:

I tell two stories in Alone Together: today’s story of the network, with its promise to give us more control over human relationships, and tomorrow’s story of sociable robots, which promise relationships where we will be in control, even if that means not being in relationships at all.

Sherry later summarizes her narrative:

The narrative of Alone Together describes an arc: we expect more from technology and less from each other. . . . Overwhelmed, we have been drawn to connections that seem low risk and always at hand: Facebook friends, avatars, IRC chat partners.  If convenience and control continue to be our priorities, we shall be tempted by sociable robots, where, like gamblers at their slot machines, we are promised excitement programmed in, just enough to keep us in the game.  At the robotic moment, we have to be concerned that the simplification and reduction of relationship is no longer something we complain about. It may become what we expect, even desire.

Sherry repeatedly returns to this paradox: "With sociable robots, we imagine objects as people.  Online, we invent ways of being with people that turn them into something close to objects."

The first section of the book describes the trajectory we seem to be pursuing with regard to robots: "In talking about sociable robots, I described an arc that went from seeing simulation as better than nothing to simply better, as offering companions that could meet one’s exact emotional requirements."

While I found this section intriguing, I was most deeply engaged by the second part of the narrative: the role of technology in diluting our personal relationships while seeming to enrich and expand them.  Her message is simple:  the very technologies that seem to offer more flexibility and scale in connecting with others – texting, online social networks and discussion forums – actually undermine the richness required for true intimacy to develop. While enhancing the appearance of intimacy, we are actually becoming more isolated and alone. There appears to be a Gresham’s Law of communication: weak forms of communication, left unchecked, can drive out strong forms over time.

Sherry drives these points home with deep stories of individuals wrestling with the consequences of these new communication technologies.  Those who come to this book looking for rich statistical data will be disappointed.  This is a powerful ethnographic study that makes its points come alive with individual stories and experiences.  It is up to the readers to decide how representative these stories are in terms of their own experience and the experiences of the people they know. For me, the stories were powerful and rang true.

Sherry also uses wonderful turns of phrases that cause readers to stop in their tracks to reflect on their meaning.  Here are just a few examples:

• "There but not there" (describing how we present ourselves in social situations)

• "Connectivity and its discontents"

• "Consumed by that which we were nourished by"

• "Moments of more may leave us with lives of less"

• "We have moved from multi-tasking to multi-lifing"

• "The notion of authenticity is for us what sex was for the Victorians – threat and obsession, taboo and fascination."

• "The ties we form through the Internet are not, in the end, the ties that bind. But they are the ties that preoccupy."

Going deeper to understand the causes

So, why are we using technology in ways that isolate while creating the illusion of connectivity? It would be too easy to say that technology makes it so.  The technology has power because it addresses psychological vulnerabilities that many of us have. We want connection, but many of us fear the consequences of connection. True intimacy can be very scary. As Sherry points out, this is particularly true of the narcissists – those with “a personality so fragile that it needs constant support”:

[The narcissistic personality] cannot tolerate the complex demands of other people but tries to relate to them by distorting who they are and splitting off what it needs, what it can use. . . . a fragile person can also be supported by selected  and limited contacts with people (say, the people on a cell phone “favorites” list). In a life of texting and messaging, those on that contact list can be made to appear almost on demand. You can take what you need and move on. And, if not gratified, you can try someone else.”

This can set into motion a vicious cycle. As Sherry points out:

. . . if we ask, “What does simulation want?” we know what it wants. It wants – it demands – immersion. But immersed in simulation, it can be hard to remember all that lies beyond it or even to acknowledge that everything is not captured by it. For simulation not only demands but creates a self that prefers simulation.  Simulation offers relationships simpler than real life can provide. We become accustomed to the reductions and betrayals that prepare us for life with the robotic.

I think Sherry is right to point out that the explanation for our particular usage patterns of communication technology must begin with our own individual needs and vulnerabilities.  But I would have liked her to go further in exploring how these patterns emerge and get reinforced by our broader social and economic contexts. She discusses increasing time pressure but does not really explore why this is occurring.

The impact of our business landscape

Many of the usage patterns she describes so compellingly have their source in the business world where globalization and digital technology infrastructures are increasing competitive pressure and leading to sustained erosion in performance. Rather than stepping back to reassess if the current way of doing business is still appropriate, the reaction of most business executives is to squeeze harder, demanding more output with fewer and fewer resources.  In this environment, the basic assumptions of the business world take even deeper root: transactions trump relationships, short-term trumps long-term, multi-tasking trumps focus, predictability and control trump experimentation and initiative.

The new modes of communication enabled by technology fit right in to this mindset. They provide us with the illusion of control and predictability.

Our children are not immune. Parents, sensing growing pressure on themselves, demand more from their children earlier in life. The day of the average child is programmed from early morning to late at night. As children grow into teens, the pressure mounts. Our children are often the first to embrace the new technology as a way to cope with the growing time pressures and adults then learn from their children.

In this context, we might want to challenge the conventional wisdom regarding the “consumerization” of IT.  Yes, individuals are rapidly adopting new forms of technology and drawing it into the enterprise. But perhaps they are adopting this technology in response to growing pressures from the workplace. Maybe they are using it in ways that are consistent with the dominant mindset in the business world.

In fact, there may be a long-evolving connection between our individual psychological needs and the evolution of our business landscape over the past 60 years.  Sherry cites the work of the sociologist David Riesman who, back in the mid-1950’s, observed that Americans were turning from an inner- to an other-directed sense of the self (the title of his book, “The Lonely Crowd,” echoes the title of Sherry’s book).  Riesman in fact tied this shift explicitly to the needs of the modern organization. More recently, Robert Putnam wrote his seminal book, “Bowling Alone”, a decade ago to draw attention to the significant decline in participation in civic organizations by the average American, blaming it in part to the rise of television and the Internet.

The rise of the push driven organization and its implications for the individual

Perhaps all of this has been playing out over a longer period of time in response to the rise of the 20th century organization, one built on a drive for scalable efficiency and the broad adoption of push programs to achieve this goal.  Push programs, designed to mobilize people and resources in advance to meet forecasted demand, have many interesting consequences. Predictability becomes the highest objective.

To achieve predictability, people are treated as objects, or better yet, robots designed to execute detailed programs. They learn that their needs are not important but that their status and rewards hinge on being externally focused on the needs of the organization.

Relationships fall by the wayside as everyone becomes more tightly focused on short-term transactions specified by the push programs. Communication becomes instrumental, designed to achieve the task at hand as quickly and as efficiently as possible. As performance pressures continue to mount, it is not surprising that we embrace any technology that emerges that can help us attain the robotic ideal more effectively.

So what is the answer?

To address these mounting pressures and the impact they have on the relationships around us, perhaps we need something more than conversations and small behavior changes. In the face of mounting pressures from our work lives, perhaps we need something more fundamental.  Perhaps we need to re-connect with our passion and find ways to integrate our passion with our profession.

In reflecting on Sherry’s book, I went through the exercise of identifying people that I thought were relatively immune from the technology-enabled behaviors that Sherry so eloquently identifies and criticizes.  The outliers that came to mind all had one thing in common: they were deeply passionate about their work and had what I have described as the “passion of the explorer”.

Driven by a connecting disposition, these people deeply engage with others and rapidly build trust-based relationships, relying heavily on face to face meetings and lengthy phone (or Skype) conversations. They enrich these relationships by drawing people into shared quests where deep engagement is required to come up with the creative new approaches to succeed in the quest.

These individuals are not vulnerable to continued distraction by the myriad demands on their attention. While they explore actively beyond their comfort zone, they remain tightly focused on the domain that is the object of their passion. They also have a deepening sense of self as they become more and more aware of their current limitations and the potential within them that needs to be drawn out.

The business implications of "Alone Together"

But, how to reconnect this back to our workplace? Well, it turns out that passion is a key driver of sustained extreme performance improvement. As individuals in an increasingly competitive world, we are more likely to succeed if we are pursuing our passion because we will improve our performance more rapidly than we would if we simply remain in a 9-5 job.  From a company perspective, companies will begin to realize that the old approaches are yielding diminishing returns and that the only way to remain competitive is to create environments that can help passionate employees to more effectively achieve their potential, including modes of communication that foster deep, trust-based relationships, both within the firm and outside the firm.

For reasons developed more fully in "The Power of Pull," Sherry’s book should not just be read as a plea to us as individuals struggling with fraying relationships.  It needs to become required reading for business executives to ponder in the context of mounting performance pressure. Are the modes of communication described by Sherry the modes that will be most helpful in driving creativity, innovation and rapid learning from each other? We are not only paying a high social price for our current use of technology; there is a high business price being paid as well.

Finding Stability at the Core of Change

As the New Year dawns, all of our thoughts turn to the changes ahead. At the same time, it might be an occasion to reflect on what will not change.  What will be the sources of stability that will help to sustain us through the accelerating changes unfolding around us? In virtually all of the writing about our era today among the digerati, there is very little focus on where that stability will come from and what will be required to nurture it.

The need for stability

I am particularly sensitive about this topic because of my childhood.  As many of you know, I grew up outside the United States, living in a different country virtually every year.  I gained enormously from the massive changes that I experienced on a continuing basis throughout my childhood.  But I also missed something, something really important.  I had very little stability.  My extended family was distant (at a time when distance really mattered) and my childhood friends came and went with each move to a different country (with no Facebook to stay in touch).  My only source of “stability” was a dysfunctional nuclear family with tremendous volatility. I felt the absence of stability with every passing day, I missed it and I suffered as a result of it. So, perhaps it is understandable why I focus on it more than others. But I am not alone.

As we move into a world of ever increasing flux and instability, one of the most striking trends is the demographic growth of fundamentalist religions across the world.  This is one of the most rapidly growing segments in the global population.  It is a trend that the digerati would prefer to ignore, dismissing these people as narrow-minded bigots and luddites.  To the extent that they cannot ignore this trend, the digerati instinct is to go on the attack, denouncing fundamentalists as obstacles to progress at best and as oppressors at worst.

Certainly, terrible things have been done in the name of fundamentalist religions of all stripes.  But perhaps, rather than instinctively dismissing and opposing these movements, we might actually want to engage with them. (I hasten to add here that I am personally not a religious fundamentalist.) By engagement, I mean making a legitimate effort to understand why such movements are gaining ground around the world at this particular time and exploring the legitimate unmet needs that might be fueling the growth of these movements.

I suspect the growth of these movements has something to do with a growing sense of an unmet need for stability. Change inevitably generates fear and, if there is nothing to hold onto as many of the things we knew and trusted fall by wayside, we are much more likely to try to stop change.

Sources of stability

Where could such stability come from in a world where 5 exabytes of new data spew forth every two days and where long-standing relationships give way to transactions that appear and disappear in the blink of an eye? What are the alternatives to theocratic regimes that ruthlessly impose the unchanging word of God on everyone?

I may be optimistic but I believe that, if we truly understand what is required to succeed in an ever more rapidly changing world, we will at the same time discover sources of stability that will provide us with the firm grounding that we all, even the most jaded adrenaline junkies, need to thrive.

Tacit knowledge. Let’s start with the observation that the growing avalanche of data increasingly distracts us from something far more valuable.  Here’s the paradox, as data proliferates, something else becomes more and more valuable and yet more difficult to access.  Tacit knowledge is the knowledge deeply embedded in each of us, our relationships and our unique contexts.  It is the knowledge that we find most challenging to articulate and communicate. But it is also often the knowledge formed by new experiences – providing early insights into the changing world around us. If we truly want to get an early understanding of what is emerging over the horizon, we need to find ways to tap into this tacit knowledge.  Accessing this knowledge requires real effort – effort that we increasingly find more and more challenging because of the overwhelming distractions of the flood of data and transactions that consume our attention. Who has time?

Trust-based relationships. As a result, something else acquires more and more value.  At the time when we are consumed by short-term transactions, long-term, trust-based relationships acquire more and more importance.  Tacit knowledge does not “flow”. In the words of JSB, it is “sticky”. We find such knowledge very difficult to articulate, even to ourselves, even though it comes naturally to us in our daily activities. The best way to access tacit knowledge is in the context of trust-based relationships, relationships that take time to develop and evolve. In the absence of trust, we are unlikely to make the effort to communicate the tacit knowledge we have, especially because we are likely to stumble and make mistakes – we are likely to become vulnerable and we need safety to feel comfortable doing this.  Once again, these trust-based relationships are more difficult to nurture at a time when we are deluged with data and transactions that demand more and more of our attention.

Talent development. Why does all this matter? Maybe we should just accept the inevitable and bid tacit knowledge and trust-based relationships a sad farewell. Well, here’s the rub.  In a more rapidly changing world, our success and, in a very real sense, our survival, depends on our ability to learn faster and accelerate the development of our talent.  The half-life of any skill is rapidly diminishing.  If we are not continually investing in talent development, we become marginalized.  What are the most relevant and valuable skills to acquire? They are the ones deeply embedded in the tacit knowledge of those on the edges of our economy and society, those who are encountering first-hand and ahead of the rest of us the challenges and opportunities that we all soon will face.  There’s very limited data on the edge and the data that does exist may help us to understand the “what” and the “why,” but rarely the “how.”

To get to the how, we need to find ways to access the tacit knowledge embedded in the people experiencing these changes. And, as we have seen, accessing tacit knowledge requires deep, trust-based relationships. This is exactly why tacit knowledge and trust-based relationships acquire increasing value as the pace of change accelerates – without them, we will never be able to develop the most valuable skills required to succeed and survive in a more rapidly changing world.

The bottom line

So, the optimist in me says that accelerating change breeds exactly the kinds of needs that will give rise to new sources of stability.  While the digerati remain entranced with ever larger data flows and millisecond transactions, something much more valuable calls for our attention.  As we enter a new decade, the greatest wealth will be created by a new set of entrepreneurs. These entrepreneurs will understand and address the unmet needs of those who want to participate in environments that foster deep, trust-based relationships across both virtual and physical space.  These environments will focus participants on the opportunity to learn faster by working together in addressing challenges that draw on the tacit knowledge of each participant. This is an opportunity that none of the current leaders of the commercial Internet understand, much less address.  There is a white space here.

In addressing this white space, we may begin to find common ground with the millions around the world who have reacted to accelerating change by opting out and embracing the never changing word of God. These people might begin to see change as an opportunity to develop their potential more fully and, in the process, develop a deep set of relationships that offer a foundation for coping with the challenges of change.  At the same time, the digerati may begin to embrace more fully the need to build long-term, trust-based relationships in order to effectively harness the opportunities created by change. They might in fact begin to articulate a new variant of the sacred, one that is not static and defensive, but one that celebrates the infinite creativity of the universe.

If we listen carefully to the fundamentalist critique, we may come to recognize that our lives have indeed become less satisfying and more superficial because of our growing focus on data and transactions in ways that make it more and more difficult to achieve our potential as individuals, institutions and society. The three T’s – tacit knowledge, trust-based relationships and talent development – may become the common ground to help us all advance to new levels.

Both camps across the global chasm may finally begin to see that sustainable change requires a foundation of stability and that stability has even more value if it enables all of us to more effectively realize our potential.  Beyond stability lies thrivability and thrivability can only be achieved by more effectively integrating change and stability. Perhaps it is too much to hope for, but I believe that many of those displaying the passion of the true believer could discover the delights of the passion of the explorer.

On a personal level, I cherish the growing set of deep relationships that have evolved as part of my quest to be a catalyst for change. It provides a stability that I sorely missed as a child and young adult. But, here's the paradox, it also helps me to grow in ways that I never could on my own.

My Personal Passion Trajectory

As I've become more engaged on the topic of passion, I've been thinking about the inevitable question: what is my passion?  How would I characterize it? How has it evolved over time? As I reflected on these questions, I developed some real insight about the essence of my passion, so I thought I would share it in case it might help others to explore and understand their passion.

Construction Projects

One of my earliest memories is a fascination with tractors and construction equipment.  On weekends, my parents knew that nothing would make me happier than taking me to a construction site where large equipment sat idle and where I could clamber over the equipment and imagine that I was manipulating the equipment to build some incredible edifice.  Forget about toy tractors.  I wanted the real thing – it got me very excited to sit in the seat of a large bulldozer.

What was that all about?  I would not have been very articulate at the time, but even at this early stage I was passionate about potential and possibility – especially very large scale potential and possibility.  In my mind’s eye, I could see extraordinarily intricate buildings with graceful curves rising from the barren ground, providing inviting places for people to work and live.  There was so much possibility in that ground. The potential was there to be tapped.  I didn’t just want to passively observe the construction process – I wanted to be at the helm of the massive equipment required to release that potential.

Cities

When I got a bit older, I discovered school.  Rather than possibility and potential, I saw boredom and barriers.  So I broke out.  I was almost expelled from third grade because I had taken to forging notes from my mother asking me to be released from class so that I could go to doctor’s appointments.  I developed a reputation among the school staff as a very sickly child. 

In fact, what I was doing was venturing out on the streets of Caracas, Venezuela (where we lived at the time) to explore the incredible sights and sounds of a complex city.  What drew me into the streets was a fascination with the diversity of the people drawn to the large city in search of opportunity.  I saw very different possibilities in my travel through the streets. I didn’t want to just read about these possibilities or even observe them through a car window.  I wanted to be on the streets, experiencing these possibilities firsthand. My adventures came to an unexpected end when, one day, my mother showed up earlier than usual at the school and was told by a puzzled administrator that she thought I was with her at the doctor’s office.

Countries

As a child, I lived in a different country virtually every year.  It was an extraordinary experience – I saw so many different cultures and lifestyles that I developed a deep appreciation for the potential and broad possibilities available to people as they strived to make a difference.  I developed a deep curiosity about how people lived and the different cultures they developed to help them connect and draw on the strengths of others.  I now badgered my parents to go exploring on weekends, venturing out to the countryside and remote towns, eager to absorb all the possibilities around me.  If we were on a highway and there was an opportunity to take a smaller, less direct road, I would always vote for the back roads.

Markets

As I headed into high school, I discovered economics. Not the dull, static economics of equilibrium and ceteris paribus, but the much more tumultuous economics of entrepreneurship and creative destruction. Hayek, Mises and Schumpeter excited my imagination with the power of markets to tap into local knowledge, coordinate activity across vast distances and unleash innovation from unexpected quarters to challenge entrenched interests and create opportunity for a whole new set of players. 

This was really exciting. Markets could scale much better than even the most ambitious construction project.  Markets were far more diverse and dynamic than any individual city or even national culture.  They offered rich opportunities to develop new potential and harness a growing array of possibilities. I was hooked.  Once again, I didn’t just want to read about these markets. I wanted to get into those markets and participate in building businesses that could unleash greater and greater potential.

Business strategy

I ended up in management consulting.  I loved the opportunity to engage with a large number of diverse people and tackle really big opportunities for innovation and growth.  I became more and more focused on strategy consulting. It offered an opportunity to help companies explore new possibilities in terms of growth and innovation and ultimately to achieve their potential more fully.

Information technology 

I left my first consulting job at BCG to launch a computer startup.  This was the catalyst for my move to California and particularly to Silicon Valley.  It also provided a deep immersion into information technology, a field where, as an economic history major, I had precious little exposure.  Once again, I was hooked.  I discovered that information technology was an incredibly dynamic domain, constantly generating new capabilities that could amplify our potential as human beings.  It offered me a new set of tools to help others to achieve their potential and expand their array of possibilities.

I ultimately returned to strategy consulting, though, because I found startup life far too all consuming. I had significant impact on my immediate surroundings, but I wanted more.  I wanted to reach out and connect to far more people. 

As I moved back into consulting, I discovered the power of writing and speaking to large groups.  I could have far more impact on the potential and possibility of others through writing than I could ever hope to achieve through one on one consulting.  I began to write about the intersection of business strategy and information technology and especially the new opportunities created at this intersection.

The passion path

As I step back and reflect on this evolution of my passion over time, I begin to see a common theme. At one level, my passions could not be more diverse – construction, international life, economics and technology. But they have all been focused on one quest – how to participate in ways to scale potential and possibility for others.  Each time I have shifted focus, it has been to find a way to scale potential and possibility even more effectively so that I could broaden my impact.  From a single construction site to an individual city or country to a global economy to an increasingly powerful global engine for amplifying reach and richness of relationships, my passion has led me on a journey of expanding horizons.

My passion has not shifted – it has evolved, with previous generations of passion still living on – I still engage in my earlier passions. Think of them as geological sediments that still live on and support the passion layers above. 

Passions can evolve significantly over a lifetime, yet they often display a common theme that knits together various stages of development.  My own personal passion trajectory illustrates this progression.

The personal path

Something interesting also happened along the way.  My passion has always been about scaling potential and possibility for others.  Over time, I began to find that pursuing my passion opened up more potential and possibility for me as well.  I began life as a very shy individual with few deep relationships. As I have pursued my passion, I felt an increasingly compelling need not just to observe and understand but to make more and more contributions of my own. In the process, I have been able to overcome my natural shyness (not entirely, but to a far greater degree than I would have imagined possible).

Initially, I found an outlet in writing that allowed me to express myself and contribute from the safety of my study, without having to take on too much of the perceived risk in personal relationships. I found that I got a lot of positive feedback from my writing. The efforts of many who have read my work to reach out and connect in person helped motivate me to overcome my natural instinct to stay in my study.  I have built a rich and growing network of relationships with those who share my passion.

What is your passion trajectory?  Has your passion remained constant?  Can you define a common theme tying together the various strands of passion that you may have pursued over your life?

[I covered a briefer version of this passion trajectory in my talk earlier this year at the Business Innovation Factory Summit in Providence, Rhode Island]

The Big Shift: Challenge and Opportunity for Women

How are women affected by the longer-term changes that are transforming our business environment? This issue is rarely explored.  Since I am on the edge anyway, I thought I would venture into this potentially sensitive topic. 

Last week I had an opportunity to address a gathering of TEDxWomen in the Bay area. This offered the opportunity I needed to frame a perspective that had been been evolving regarding the gender implications of the Big Shift.  My talk last week provided me with the forum to share some of these ideas.  It was very well received, so I thought I might share it with a broader audience here to get further feedback and reactions.

The challenge for women

As those who follow me know by now, a key element of the Big Shift, especially in its early stages, is a significant and sustained erosion of corporate performance.  This is a trend that has been playing out for over four decades now. It is represented most graphically in our Shift Index by the 75% decline in return on assets for all US public companies since 1965. It shows no sign of leveling off, much less turning around.

In a period of mounting performance pressure, targets of biases tend to suffer the most. When rewards become scarcer, there is a tendency for people who are discriminated against to have an even harder time in getting ahead.  Since women continue to suffer bias in the workplace, this mounting performance pressure represents an even greater challenge for them.

But it gets worse.  As pressure increases, there is tendency to adopt a zero sum view of the world – if someone else gains, I necessarily must lose.  In this view, we are at war; we can give no quarter.

The prevalence of the masculine archetype

In a time of war, a certain type of approach tends to become more dominant – let me call it the “masculine archetype”.  The masculine archetype is built upon a certain set of beliefs:

• We can't afford to get tied down in long-term relationships - our focus is on short-term transactions (“battles”) where the goal is to get as much as possible out of each transaction and to treat each transaction as an independent event – buy low, sell high and move on

• There is no room for emotion – emotion is a luxury that we can’t afford to indulge in, we must put emotion to the side

• Expressions of vulnerability must be avoided at all costs – we must always project strength

• We must be deeply analytical, dispassionately seeking to understand the world around us

• Complex systems can and should be reduced to their component parts so that the analysis is feasible and can be completed in a short period of time

• Once we understand the component elements, we need to move quickly and ruthlessly to exploit any advantage available to us

• Change represents threat and risk – we must find ways to control our environment so that it stabilizes and becomes more predictable

From the viewpoint of this masculine archetype, what we really need are a few good men (literally).  If women want to participate in the effort, they must be prepared to adopt and embrace this masculine archetype.

Understanding the cause of mounting pressures

This reaction to the mounting pressure is a key part of the problem – it reflects a complete lack of understanding of the sources and causes of the mounting pressure that companies are experiencing.

Put briefly, the mounting pressure is not just the result of intensifying competition.  The basis of competition is also shifting in fundamental ways.  For example, the source of value creation is shifting from knowledge stocks to knowledge flows, something I have described in more detail elsewhere. In a world of more rapidly depreciating knowledge stocks, the only way to continue to create economic value is to find ways to participate in a larger number of richer and more diverse knowledge flows. The deterioration in corporate performance reflects our futile attempts to make practices and institutions developed in a previous era work in a new era requiring different approaches to create value.

Requirements for success

Let’s drill down on this a bit.  When I talk about knowledge flows, I am not focusing on large databases flowing through cyberspace.  The knowledge that has greatest value in times of rapid change is tacit knowledge, the knowledge that we all have in our heads that is tied to certain contexts, often quite new, and that we have great difficulty expressing to ourselves, much less anyone else. This knowledge is usually experienced holistically rather than reducible to abstract categories and isolated modules. For all of these reasons, this knowledge does not flow very well at all. In the words of my esteemed collaborator, JSB, this knowledge is remarkably sticky.

As a result, trust based relationships become more and more valuable.  It is only in the context of trust based relationships that people become willing to invest the time and take the risk to express the tacit knowledge they have. So, if we want tacit knowledge to flow, we must first become adept at building deep, trust-based relationships.  Trust is challenging to build.  It requires a willingness to express vulnerability – if we are unwilling to express weakness or failures we have had, it is very difficult for someone else to fully trust us.  Trust is also easier to build when it is clear that all participants are driven by a desire to learn and reach new levels of performance.  In that context, zero sum relationships that focus on dividing a fixed pie of rewards evolve into positive sum relationships where participants are driven by the opportunity to expand the overall pie.  When there is a real prospect of expanding rewards, we are much more likely to trust others than when everyone is focused on how to get a bigger share of a fixed pie.

In a rapidly changing world, though, it is not enough to have a few trust-based relationships.  To get access to a broader and more diverse range of knowledge flows, we must find ways to scale the number of trust based relationships that we can build and maintain.  Rather than a few trusted strategic partners, we must find ways to weave together large ecosystems of participants that can help us to more rapidly refresh our knowledge stocks by tapping into many diverse environments.

Now, let’s step back and reflect on the masculine archetype described earlier.  Is this archetype one that is likely to succeed in the effort to build large numbers of trust based relationships to access tacit knowledge?  Not very likely.

The feminine archetype

What is required is a very different archetype.  For convenience and contrast, let me characterize this different archetype as the “feminine archetype”.  What does it look like?

• We need to build and nurture long-term relationships, rather than focusing on short-term transactions

• To really understand the world around us, we must adopt a much more holistic approach, seeking out the patterns and deep dynamics that shape broader more complex systems

• Our communication styles need to become richer and more nuanced – rather than trafficking in large data sets and quantitative analysis, it focuses on metaphors, stories and images as a way to engage the imagination and achieve a deep understanding of the essence of events and environments.

• We will be much more effective if we can integrate our feelings and intuition to deepen connections, motivate participants to act and mobilize them in ways that increase impact

• We embrace change because it provides a powerful catalyst for growth and learning

This archetype is far more promising in terms of building long-term trust-based relationships and participating in flows of tacit knowledge.  In fact, by facilitating these efforts, this archetype can turn mounting pressure into expanding opportunity.  We may for the first time have the opportunity to move from a diminishing returns world to an increasing returns world.  This truly would catalyze a profound shift.

The bottom line

The future of business belongs to the feminine archetype.  The future belongs to those of us, female or male, who can adopt and embrace the feminine archetype.  It offers far more potential and possibility than the masculine archetype which worked much better in a world of scalable efficiency than in today’s world of scalable peer to peer learning. Those of us who remain wedded to the masculine archetype will find ourselves increasingly stressed and challenged as the world evolves more rapidly around us.

Now, of course, it is ultimately not an either/or choice.  We must find ways to more effectively integrate the masculine and feminine archetypes to draw on the strengths of each.  But, at the end of the day, the pendulum must swing much more in the direction of the feminine archetype if we are realize the potential that the Big Shift represents for all of us

Passion and Wisdom

Passion and wisdom. Youth and age.  Most of us would say that these are two ends of the spectrum.  Many say that one can either be passionate or wise, but not both.  Passion typically prevails in one’s youth while wisdom gains prominence with age and experience.

I want to challenge this belief.  In fact, passion and wisdom amplify each other – each one alone has far less impact than when the two are combined. Rather than opposites, these two are powerful complements.

Defining passion and wisdom

Both passion and wisdom have many meanings, so let me begin by offering my own interpretation of each.  As I have written before, I focus on the passion of the explorer – a sustained commitment to exploring a particular domain and to achieving constantly increasing levels of performance and impact in that domain over time.

Wisdom also has many meanings but the one that resonates with me is ability to draw out optimal value from people, shaped by a deep understanding of existing performance capabilities – both one’s own and those of others. Wisdom understands the value that matters the most and seeks to draw more of it out in a sustainable way, given existing performance limits. Sustainability is a key attribute here – anyone can squeeze hard in the short-term to draw out the next increment of value but being able to sustain that value over time is far more challenging – and rewarding for all concerned.

Common elements of passion and wisdom

From this perspective, both wisdom and passion are concerned with performance limits.  Wisdom focuses on existing performance limits but seeks to derive as much value as possible within these limits.  Passion on the other hand focuses on overcoming these performance limits and achieving higher and higher levels of performance. In this context, it is perhaps easy to understand why these two attributes are often viewed as opposites – wisdom accepts and operates within existing performance limits while passion continually seeks to challenge and go beyond existing limits.

But both wisdom and passion are dynamic - they both seek to go beyond what has already been achieved. Wisdom is not passive – it always looks for new approaches to increase value within existing performance limits. In contrast, passion explores ways to transcend existing performance limits.  Neither one passively accepts the status quo – both are engaged in a quest to realize more value given current conditions.

The perils of passion and wisdom in isolation

Wisdom in isolation falls prey to diminishing returns.  No matter how thoughtful and creative we might be, we ultimately run up against the limits of current capability.  The longer we work at it, the harder it becomes to find the next increment of value within current performance limits.

Even more seriously, wisdom is vulnerable in the Big Shift.  The unstated assumptions and insights about limits, often developed in an earlier time, are prone to becoming incorrect and even barriers to progress.  In isolation, without continual testing, wisdom can become an obstacle to innovation as “wise” leaders apply the experience gained in an earlier era to changed circumstances. If “wisdom” remains wedded to earlier views of capabilities, it narrows and confines, rather than expanding and exploring.

On the other hand, passion in isolation falls prey to reckless risk-taking, increasing the prospect of catastrophic failure.  Without a clear understanding and appreciation for current performance limits, we embark on initiatives that take us well beyond the edge into the abyss beyond.

The imperative to integrate passion and wisdom

In a world of mounting performance pressure where current limits become prisons that ultimately crush participants, effectively integrating wisdom and passion is not just an opportunity, it is an imperative.

We need the productive friction that comes from bringing together passion and wisdom. Wisdom calls us to understand deeply existing limits while passion calls us to embark on a never-ending quest to expand those limits and discover new levels of performance.  Passion continually challenges our assumptions about limits while wisdom continually reminds us that we must pursue paths that honor who we are today. The friction comes from the tacit knowledge that shapes both passion and wisdom – it can help to render this tacit knowledge more explicit and test and refine it. 

In practice, the people that continue to achieve new levels of performance within a particular domain demonstrate a remarkable ability to integrate passion and wisdom.  Think of extreme athletes or top tier players in World of Warcraft.  These participants are constantly probing beyond current levels of performance but they deeply understand existing limits for themselves and those they collaborate with. It is precisely this careful balancing act that enables them to take appropriate risk and successfully discover new approaches that define new levels of performance.

Passion and wisdom come together in a remarkably powerful form of bootstrapping.  Passion relentlessly seeks out new edges to drive performance to new levels, tempered by the understanding of limits provided by wisdom.  Wisdom strives to extract as much value as possible within current limits, tempered by the continual urge provided by passion to test and extend those limits. By integrating both of these, we make the most of what we have while constantly striving to find ways to reach new levels of performance. This is precisely the definition of success in a world of mounting performance pressure – making the fullest possible use of the resources available to us while never accepting the limits imposed by those resources.  By combining these two attributes, we make thrivability, rather than sustainability, our reality.

The power to build trust-based relationships

These two traits also have a profound social impact as well.  They combine to produce deep, trust-based relationships that help to draw out far more sustainable value than could ever be accomplished by any individual in isolation.  As I have noted elsewhere, passion is marked by a strong connecting disposition. People with passion are constantly searching for others who either share their passion or who can be helpful to them in their quest to achieve new levels of performance.

But passion does even more.  People with passion are not just connecting with others; they find it far easier to build deep, trust-based relationships.  Think about those you know who have passion.  They have little patience for the carefully crafted facades that business texts urge us to present – accentuating our strengths and accomplishments while hiding our weaknesses and limits.  Passionate people have to time for such facades.  What you see is what you get.  They present themselves as who they are – something that helps to build trust more quickly.

But there's something even more powerful.  Think about it.  Very shortly after meeting someone with passion, he/she is likely to start describing a really gnarly problem they are wrestling with, acknowledging that they don’t have a clue what the answer might be and inviting others to offer any ideas or suggestions that they might have.  Passionate people quickly and willingly express vulnerability. Sharing vulnerability builds trust – in fact, it is virtually impossible to build trust without sharing vulnerability.

Now, let’s combine passion with wisdom.  Wisdom deeply understands existing limits.  This also helps to build trust.  If a passionate person communicates they understand their own limits as well as the limits of those around them, others are likely to trust that the person will act prudently in ways that will not expose themselves or others to unnecessary or unexpected risk.

By building trust more effectively, wisely passionate people are able to mobilize people and resources far beyond their own sphere.  They are far more effective in leveraging the capability of others and, with relatively modest resources of their own, they can achieve significant and lasting impact.  In fact, for them, small moves, smartly made, can set big things in motion.

The tragedy today

Given all of this, why do we continue to treat passion and wisdom as opposites, in deep conflict with each other, rather than as complements, that are increasingly needed to amplify and reinforce each other?  Even more importantly, why are passion and wisdom in such short supply within the corporate world?

The answers to these questions are perhaps worthy of another posting. For the moment, though, let me offer a high level response.  Both passion and wisdom, properly understood, are long-term quests, inspiring continuing creativity and exploration in search of ways to generate ever more sustainable value.

As such, they stand in stark contrast to our prevailing push mindsets, practices and institutions that reward, and in fact demand, short-term predictability. These approaches seek to enforce well-defined and tightly integrated programs to ensure predictability.  Our push world relentlessly seeks out more and more efficiency while both passion and wisdom focus on creating more value from available resources.

Even more fundamentally, both passion and wisdom are not predictable – that is in fact their great strength, they are continually coming up with new ways to create more value. The tragedy is that, in today’s world, this makes both of these attributes deeply suspect even though they are both more needed than ever.

2010 Shift Index - Passion and Performance

Over two years ago, John Seely Brown and I set out on a quest, one that experts called “valuable, but foolhardy.”  What were we trying to do? We wanted to create an index that would help business leaders and policy makers to make sense of the long-term changes re-shaping our business landscape.

It all began with an exercise in a conference room. We wanted to know what indices decision-makers use to understand the economic and business environment. As we put up all the usual suspects on a white board – inflation, unemployment, factory orders, etc. – one thing became clear.  All the indices focused on short-term economic trends. They were very helpful on that dimension. But they offered little insight on the longer-term trends playing out around us.

Virtually every business executive we knew strongly believed we were in the midst of a profound, long-term shift in our global economy.  Yet, there did not seem to be an index to help executives understand and track those longer-term changes.

We brought together a workshop of the architects of some of our leading indices today.  They confirmed that there were no indices focused on this longer-term shift. They agreed that such an index would be extremely valuable. But they also warned that such an undertaking would be virtually impossible to pull off.  There were simply too many moving parts and many of the key elements would be very difficult to quantify.

That was all we needed to hear.  There was something very valuable to pursue that would be extremely challenging to develop.  Just the sort of quest that gets us excited.  We recruited a team of Edge Fellows at our Center for the Edge to join this quest with us. While many Edge Fellows ultimately contributed to our quest (they are listed in the Shift Index), two in particular played a pivotal role in helping to orchestrate and design the effort: Duleesha Kulasooriya and Dan Elbert.

The first Shift Index

Eighteen months later, we released in the Spring of 2009 the first Shift Index, containing 25 metrics designed to capture key dimensions of the Big Shift in the US economy. In the Fall of 2009, we issued a sequel that broke apart the US economy data into thirteen distinct industries, so that we could better understand how the Big Shift was playing our at an industry level.

The release of the 2010 Shift Index

Late last week, we issued the 2010 edition of the Shift Index, updating each metric with new data.  Perhaps not surprisingly, given its focus on long-term trends, this edition of the Shift Index confirms many of the trends identified in the original report. In a previous posting, I summarized the key trends revealed by our original report.

The Shift Index delivers one key message:  our companies are experiencing mounting performance pressures, pressures that they have not been successful in addressing. One way of thinking about this is to imagine a pincer move on our companies, with increasingly powerful customers on one side and increasingly powerful creative talent on the other side, both coming together to extract more value from the companies they deal with. This pressure has been mounting steadily for over four decades and there is no evidence of it leveling off, much less turning around.

This puts into perspective our current obsession with the much anticipated recovery from the economic downturn.  While certainly important, this obsession tends to distract from a much more profound and long-term challenge that continues to mount in the background and will likely persist far beyond the economic recovery that offers some temporary respite from the mounting pressure.

To measure this mounting performance pressure, the Shift Index focuses on return on assets (ROA) for all public companies in the US since 1965. The bottom line: ROA has collapsed by more than 75% over this period.  Many people questioned our original choice of ROA as the key measure of business performance.  While we continue to believe that this is the best measure of business fundamentals, the new edition of the Shift Index looks at a number of the suggested alternative measures, including return on invested capital and return on equity, and confirms that these measures have also declined significantly over this time period.

Passion and performance

This edition of the Shift Index also goes into more detail regarding the level of passion in our workforce and its likely impact on business performance.  In particular, we highlight two dispositions that are closely linked to passion: questing disposition and connecting disposition. A questing disposition addresses the desire to seek out challenges to test one’s performance and achieve new levels of performance. A connecting disposition focuses on the desire to actively seek out people who share one’s interests and who can be helpful in addressing new challenges.

Our proprietary survey of the US workforce indicates that employees who are passionate about their work are twice as likely to have a questing disposition and a connecting disposition. For companies hoping to overcome mounting performance pressures having passionate workers with these dispositions would significantly improve their likelihood of succeeding.

If you want to improve the performance of your company in a world of increasing uncertainty where the scale and diversity of trust-based relationships increasingly drives potential for value creation, you want workers with questing and connecting dispositions – in other words, you want workers with passion.

The challenge is that passion levels remain very low within the workforce – under 25% of the workers are passionate about their work.  And there’s an even bigger problem for large companies. The level of passion in the workforce is inversely related to the size of the company – the larger the company, the lower the level of passion among the workers.  The most passionate workers are those who are self-employed or working as independent contractors.

Our survey reveals that 26 percent of workers would like to become an independent contractor or consultant.  According to the survey, many of the individuals who choose traditional employment do so for reasons that are steadily eroding —guaranteed employment and healthcare benefits.  Factors most cited by those currently employed by firms for their hesitation in becoming independent were a need for steady income (58 percent), need for healthcare (50 percent), uncertainty in the current economy (47 percent) and need for benefits (45 percent). These factors are also the most cited by those employees that remain at their current jobs despite the fact that it does not allow them to pursue their passions.

It is becoming urgent to find ways to more actively engage those who are already passionate while pursuing approaches to more effectively motivate and engage the workers who have yet to find passion in the work they do. Executives need to look at all of the institutional and technological barriers that frustrate employees and prevent these employees from seeking out challenges that will drive performance improvement.

By removing the impediments to questing and connecting behaviors, executives can help reduce the frustration of passionate employees that make them vulnerable to other job opportunities.  Even better, those passionate employees will not be diverting their energies from workarounds and will be able to focus, instead, on engaging in, and overcoming, real performance challenges.

Our hope is that the Shift Index will continue to help executives to pull back from their short-term focus and develop a more robust agenda focused on driving sustained extreme performance improvement. In that context, we urge all executives to take a hard look at the passion (or lack of it) within their workforce and to view this as a key lever in driving performance improvement.  Without it, companies and their workers will find themselves increasingly stressed and marginalized.

Reviewing "The Social Network" - Constructing Grand Narrative

The debate has begun.  Many who know Mark Zuckerberg and his company are upset about the inaccuracies in The Social Network.  Movie critics on the other hand love the movie.  Few, though, are reflecting on what these two sets of reactions tell us about the moment we are living in.

We live in the midst of a social revolution and this movie represents the effort of mass media to make sense of the changes going on around them.  Facts are not important.  It is about symbols, metaphors and mythologies. It is about constructing grand narratives to shape our understanding of why things are happening.

And in this corner of the ring . . .

Let’s start by addressing at face value the two sides.  The Social Network is full of inaccuracies according to those who are close to the personalities and the companies.  David Kirkpatrick, author of the now definitive book on Zuckerberg’s company, does a great job of summarizing the major inaccuracies that underlie the entire film in his commentary here.

The response of the movie creators is that this is not a documentary and not meant to be accurate in all dimensions. Entertainment must be served first and foremost.  This strikes me as a bit disingenuous, although all too common of Hollywood, given that the movie purports to be about real people and real historical events, down to the final trailers telling us what happened to each of the major characters. In fact, none of the key players in the making of this film has ever met Mark Zuckerberg, the subject of the movie.  And neither the Director nor the scriptwriter has ever participated in his online social network.  As we will see, though, the core inaccuracy of the film is key to supporting the mainstream media view of what is going on.

On the other side of the fence, we have the movie reviewers in the mainstream media who have, almost without exception, been ecstatic about the movie.  In fact, the website Metacritic indicates that the movie now has a metascore of 97, based on 40 movie reviewers, the highest score of any movie currently showing.  In fact, this metascore puts it into the top 20 of movies of all time, along with The Godfather and Lawrence of Arabia.

Roger Ebert calls it “the film of the year...so far” and gives an ecstatic review here. David Denby calls it “brilliantly entertaining.”  Peter Travers  gushes “The Social Network lights up a dim movie sky with flares of startling brilliance” and “it gets you drunk on movies again.”

Now, admittedly, this is a very good movie.  It is well acted, the dialogue is wonderful and fast-paced, visually it captures and holds the attention, the music score reinforces the dramatic arc – all in all, it is well constructed and deeply entertaining. Everyone should see the movie as a compelling and beautiful example of story- telling.  But is it really up there with The Godfather and Lawrence of Arabia?

Who's got status?

Clearly this movie is speaking powerfully to these mainstream media reviewers.  But what is it saying?  It is ultimately about the tragedy of the social revolution that is playing out around us.
I don’t think it is accidental that the movie is called “The Social Network”.  From the outset, this movie is not really about Zuckerberg’s company (which it only describes in the most fragmented way), but about the evolution or, rather, revolution in social networks.  More specifically, it is about redefining status within social networks.

The movie reeks of obsession with status.  It is set largely on the Harvard campus where, for many, status is everything.  Of course, simply being a student at Harvard is a mark of status. This becomes clear from the first scene when Mark Zuckerberg’s girlfriend from Boston University is made painfully aware that Harvard is better. But Harvard students are themselves made aware that there is a deeper hierarchy even at this pinnacle – real status is being “punched” to join one of the elite and very private social clubs at Harvard, and there is a pronounced hierarchy even among and within these clubs.

As an aside, the focus on status perhaps helps to explain the appalling presentation of women in the movie.  With few exceptions, women are portrayed as drunken and drug addled pursuers of men with status, whether it is the buses of women from a lowlier college pulling up for a party at a Harvard social club or the women hanging out as Facebook groupies in Silicon Valley.  Apparently, while the sources of male status may change, women remain second class participants in these social networks, desperately seeking to be around males with status. It is clearly a man’s world under either regime.

The mainstream media, especially Hollywood, is all about status, so it can relate in a visceral and powerful way to this theme.  But the movie is ultimately about new technology platforms that are undermining traditional forms of status and creating global foundations for new forms of status. And mainstream media can really relate to this. As the mainstream media crumbles, wrestling with loss of audience, corresponding loss of advertisers and never-ending rounds of layoffs of creative talent, people in this industry are deeply aware of the revolution playing out around them.

Constructing a narrative of the revolution

What to make of this revolution?  To accept it as profound and enriching would be too difficult.  On a deeply personal level, it is tragic.  A way of life that mainstream media participants were brought up to admire and aspire to is dissolving. But the narrative of The Social Network is not that it is tragic for those who achieved status the old way.  Rather, it is tragic for the revolutionaries.  They are achieving what they wanted, but finding it empty.  This is the real message of the movie and deeply satisfying to those on the mainstream media ramparts watching the hordes gather for the final assault on the old regime.

But to construct this narrative, some license with the truth would be required.  David Kirkpatrick informs us that Zuckerberg was uninterested in joining the Harvard social clubs.  The movie on the other hand suggests from the first scene that he very much wanted to get in and was deeply resentful of those, including his best friend, who did get in. In fact, Zuckerberg was driven by a very different motivation – a desire to catalyze a very different kind of social network, one defined by sharing and transparency, rather than hiding behind brick walls and conducting humiliating rituals and holding drunken orgies.

The tragic hero

Motivation is one thing, character is another.  It is particularly hard to admire the revolutionary that is breaching the walls.  So a little more license with the facts is in order.  The movie portrays Zuckerberg as a person incapable of forming deep relationships with others and as someone who would in fact betray many of those he dealt with.  The key point in the movie is that the relationships he developed were not deep or meaningful, but superficial and calculating, much like the caricature of the online social network world held by those who view the virtual as the enemy of the physical. The last scene of the movie is particularly poignant, showing Zuckerberg trying to “friend” on his social network platform the woman who dumped him in the opening scene of the movie and checking back repeatedly to see if she had accepted.

In fact, as David Kirkpatrick and others who know Zuckerberg well, point out, Zuckerberg is shy and reserved (I like him already) but also has little insecurity, anger or resentment. He has a rich network of personal relationships, including a woman he started dating shortly before launching Thefacebook (as it was known then) and with whom he now lives.

But these facts don’t support the story that the movie wants to tell.  Of course, they could have made Zuckerberg evil, but they didn’t.  They made him a deeply tragic and flawed character who was simply trying to connect with the social networks around him and, as an outsider, ended up creating a new order that also was deeply flawed.  True, his social network platform has 500 million plus participants and is still growing rapidly.  True, Zuckerberg is the youngest self-made billionaire in history, but he could never create more than superficial relationships while pining for the real relationships that were beyond his grasp. And the real tragedy, according to the movie, is that the social network catalyzed by Zuckerberg is replacing real relationships with superficial relationships for everyone.

In case this message is not clear enough to the audience, the movie reviewers hammer it home.  Here is Peter Travers: “Fincher and Sorkin . . . define the dark irony of the past decade. The final image of solitary Mark at his computer has to resonate for a generation of users (the drug term seems apt) sitting in front of a glowing screen pretending not to be alone.” A key part of the grand narrative is to explain the large and growing following of social networks in terms of addiction.  In fact, one of the characters in the movie, observing the rapid adoption of Facebook exclaims:  "1,000 people overnight?  If I was a drug dealer I couldn't give away drugs to that many people!"

Or, here is David Denby: “ After all, Facebook, like Zuckerberg, is a paradox: a Web site that celebrates the aura of intimacy while providing the relief of distance, substituting bodiless sharing and the thrills of self-created celebrityhood for close encounters of the first kind.”

An historical tragedy of epic proportions

There it is in a nutshell.  The revolutionary is winning but the victory will be empty.  He has taken something good and transformed it into something shallow. The narcissists have won and distracted everyone from the depth and substance that we, in the mainstream media, have been providing.  The world will be worse off, defined by alienation and loneliness.  It is a tragedy of global and historic proportions. 

Seen through this lens, the distortions in the movie are not simply there to create a more engaging story; they are there to help construct a narrative of the revolution that helps to reassure the ancien regime that they were on the side of humanity.  It is no wonder that the mainstream movie reviewers are jumping out of their seats and offering standing ovations.

Addendum:

The mainstream media continues to gush over this movie -

"Once in a generation  . . . a tour de force." - Stephen Holden

"A brilliant movie" - Frank Rich

"It sends you out of the theater buzzing, breathless and eager to tell all of your friends . . . that you've just seen what might end up being the best picture of the year." - Bob Mondello

"Devastating and dazzling.  It lifts you to a state of exhilaration." - Joe Morgenstern

"Truly great." - Lou Lumenick

"Exhilarating." - Ann Hornaday

The Great Reset

Here’s a paradox.  Silicon Valley’s success hinges on an explosive mix of people and place.  Yet, when most Silicon Valley denizens gather to discuss opportunities, conversation quickly narrows to a discussion of data flows and virtual platforms. People and place rarely are front and center, unless of course the entrepreneur is trying to configure the right management team to go make a pitch to a VC firm on Sandhill Road.

Richard Florida, on the other hand, is all about people and place.  Better than anyone, he deeply understands that people and place shape outcomes in profound ways. In a number of previous works, including The Rise of the Creative Class, The Flight of the Creative Class and Who's Your City?, Richard has focused attention on the ability of specific places to attract and retain certain kinds of people.  He makes a compelling case that the right diversity of people in certain places will determine whether the place will prosper or decline.

In particular, Richard has emerged as an articulate contrarian to the prevailing view that “the world is flat.”  In fact, he convincingly demonstrates that the world is becoming increasingly spiky – people are moving at an increasing rate into densely populated cities, even with all the benefits of digital infrastructures that supposedly make geographic location irrelevant. Richard is relentless in his view that people and places matter more than ever.

The history of Great Resets

He has just written a compelling new book, The Great Reset, that takes a longer term historical view of changing patterns in the settlement of people and places. In fact, he makes a strong case that we are entering a third major reset .  From his perspective, Great Resets are precipitated by economic crises and set into motion a remaking of the economy in ways that allow it to recover and begin growing again. So far, the US has had three major resets over the past 150 years, once in the 1870s, once in the 1930s and now today.

As Richard explains it:

A true Reset transforms into simply the way we innovate and produce but also ushers in a whole new economic landscape.  As it takes shape around new infrastructure and systems of transportation, it gives rise to new housing patterns, realigning where and how we live and work.  Eventually it ushers in a whole new way of life . . . 

He goes on to emphasize that

Economic systems do not exist in the abstract; they are embedded within the geographic fabric of the society – the way land is used, the locations of homes and businesses, the infrastructure that ties people, places and commerce together . . . . A reconfiguration of this economic landscape is the real distinguishing characteristic of a Great Reset.

For Richard, economic landscape is not just a metaphor, it is quite literally the way we organize ourselves across the land. “Every major economic era gives rise to a new, distinctive geography of its own.” He further elaborates:

Great Resets are defined not just by innovation but by massive movements of people. . . . These are times when talent flows out of some places and into others. . . . These talent Resets thus shift the balance of power among cities and regions as well as among nations. Locations rise or fall based on their ability to attract, retain and productively use talent of all sorts – from brilliant innovators to unskilled laborers.

The first Great Reset in the 1870s was defined by a revolution in transportation technology and energy systems which in turn led to a fundamental shift in the organization of production, known as the “American system of manufacture.” As result, industrial cities grew bigger and more complex, segmenting into specialized neighborhoods and business areas.

The second Great Reset in the 1930s was similarly fueled by the deployment of new transportation and communication infrastructures. The introduction of modern assembly lines combined with much more efficient wholesale and retail distribution channels led to even more scale in business activities. As companies moved production activity to new locations outside the urban center, residents followed suit, moving farther and farther out into suburban sprawls, prompted by government subsidies to home ownership. The Sunbelt also emerged as an area of great population growth. 

Richard draws on the work of David Harvey to make the case that Great Resets result in “spatial fixes” that ultimately help to resolve economic crises through large-scale movement of people and channel capital into more productive uses. But these spatial fixes tend to be temporary, ultimately leading to further spatial fixes down the road.

Where we are now

The current economic crisis is precipitating the third Great Reset, as the growing imbalance between the movement of manufacturing offshore and suburban mass consumption supported by growing consumer debt became too precarious to sustain. Richard notes that we are in the midst of yet another major economic transition, driven by new infrastructures and global competition:

Our own collapse, in the early years of the twenty-first century, is the crisis of the latest economic revolution – the rise of an idea-driven knowledge economy that runs more on brains than brawn. It reflects the limits of the suburban model of development to channel the full innovation and productive capabilities of the creative economy.  The places that thrive today are those with the highest velocity of ideas, the highest density of talented and creative people, and the highest rate of metabolism. “Velocity” and “density” are not words that many people use when describing suburbia.

Sound familiar?  As knowledge flows trump knowledge stocks, we are once again rearranging people and places to support a new wave of innovation and economic growth.  What will this new economic landscape look like?

Here are some of Richard’s observations. We will need to be even more welcoming of talent born outside of the United States since these people already account for a significant portion of the innovation occurring within our borders.  We will need to move away from finance capitalism to renew our focus on the “real economy”, especially investing in technology, human capital and infrastructures that can support builders rather than traders. In parallel, “we need to grow more jobs that are high in analytical and social skills, but we also need to increase the analytical and social skills of the jobs we have.”  He discusses an unprecedented “geographic sorting of people by ability and educational attainment” as some cities prove far more effective in attracting and retaining creative talent, sucking in talent from much less successful cities. Many cities are growing dumber as others grow ever smarter.

And cities overall continue to grow, morphing into megaregions – “the concentrations of population that encompass several cities and their surrounding suburban rings – that have grown swiftly in recent years.”  The hub cities of these megaregions represent a significant magnet for young, mobile, well-educated people. Richard notes:

Across the board, [Gen Y members] said that the ability to meet people and make friends was of paramount importance. These young people intuitively understand what economic sociologists have documented: that vibrant social networks are key to landing jobs, moving forward in your career, and securing personal happiness.

Following in the path of Jane Jacobs and Robert Lucas, Richard also focuses on cities as key engines of economic growth. He cites research showing that large cities boast high rates of innovation and wealth creation and that “metabolisms” (the ability to transform inputs into economic outputs) of large cities actually accelerate as cities become bigger. In part, this is because large cities are more adept at reabsorbing talented workers – helping to explain why unemployment rates in the very largest cities in the US were actually lower than the national average during the current downturn.  Surprisingly, research suggests that densely populated cities are also greener than more distributed populations and that the rate of carbon emission growth less rapidly than the population growth of a large city.

If the Great Reset involves a massive restructuring of the economy as a means to drive new growth, any government policies designed to support and reward the old way of doing things runs a severe risk of prolonging the economic downturn. He is deeply critical of much of the government policy response to the economic crisis: “. . . we need to spend less time and effort bailing out and stimulating the old economy and a lot more on building the new.” He observes that:

The notion that only manufacturing or high-tech jobs are the source of innovation and growth is precisely what put and currently keeps the economy in its current job-creating rut.  From where I sit, service jobs offer lots of potential for innovation, entrepreneurship, and the upgrading of employment opportunities.

The ability to move ever more rapidly is a key theme of The Great Reset.  In that context, Richard suggests that we will see a significant shift away from home ownership to home rental, representing a major reversal of trends over the past decades. As he points out, “mobility and flexibility are key principles of the modern economy. Home ownership limits both.”

Comparing the Great Reset and the Big Shift

In reflecting on Richard Florida’s wonderful and provocative book, I am struck by its complementarity with the Big Shift framework we developed in The Power of Pull. That’s not surprising, given that his previous work very much influenced our perspective.  We also believe that we are in the midst of a longer-term profound shift in the economy, although we would date the shift much earlier than the current financial crisis. We would also place far more emphasis on the role of new generations of technology infrastructure, especially the Internet, in driving these changes than Richard does (the Index of his book has no reference at all to the Internet and the only infrastructure it references, true to the emphasis on people and place, is transportation infrastructure). 

Yet we agree that people and place are becoming more and more important at the same time. The increasing spikiness of our world is driven at least in part by the growing importance of flows of tacit knowledge that typically flourish with physical proximity.  Densely settled cities are becoming more central to innovation and economic growth, rather than less. In this light, Richard Florida’s book is essential reading – it describes yet another stage in the unfolding economic and social geography that will shape our transition from a diminishing returns world to an increasing returns world.

Passion and Flow

As I dive deeper into passion, I’m frequently asked: “isn’t this just another term for Mihaly Csíkszentmihályi’s concept of “flow?” Indulge me with a brief detour before I answer this question more directly.

Leaving rules behind - exploring the edge in extreme sports

Since the 1980s, a feud has raged between skiers and snowboarders, resulting in apartheid on slopes all over the world. In the US, Alta Ski Area, Deer Valley and Mad River Glen in Vermont snowboarding has been banned altogether.

Douglas Rushkoff’s 2006 book Screenagers: Lessons in Chaos from Digital Kids boils the hostility down to etiquette:

They don’t even take lessons. They wear weird clothes, talk like surfers, and represent a complete break from the time-honored tradition of skiing. And if that weren’t enough, they seek out the bumps and avoid the smooth straightaways.

Rushkoff points out that “boarding” had become endemic in sporting subcultures in a digital age. He calls surfers “children of chaos,” as athletes whose chosen field is not subject to the measure, manicure and temperature control enjoyed by almost any other sport.  The ocean is complex and unpredictable (dynamical to use Rushkoff’s term), and the surfers who ride it do not have the pretence of “taming” it. They prefer the unpredictability of the edge.

Surfing may have started the trend, but young people everywhere have embraced its chaos-ethics, as with snowboarders who prefer the lawless mountains, and skateboarders who similarly challenge themselves to “make the most of a particular set of surfaces”—in this case the contours of the urban landscape. The key distinction between extreme and traditional sports involves the place of “rules.” For young athletes today, there are none. Their practices push them to the edges of a society who deems them “punks”—uncomprehending of the staggeringly high level of skill these so-called punks develop.

Because the ethics of board sports are so rooted in pushing limits and breaking rules, theirs is a culture of one-upmanship, where athletes attempt to outdo one another and set the bar ever higher for others. In skateboarding, there is a thriving culture of both underground and sponsored low-budget videos where kids film one another attempting perilous stunts in urban environments, spreading the footage virally through the skating community and establishing a DIY catalog of tricks for others to master and emulate. The 2002 video, “PJ Ladd’s Horrible Wonderful Life,” (today one of the most well-known skate videos in history), is a classic example of amateurs who can become underground cult heroes and innovators of technique: 

 

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Ladd’s technique in this video has been considered by many to be “visionary.” One reviewer writes, “This video is essential viewing for anybody that wants to see where skating is going.” (Emphasis mine).

Now try to imagine a similar thing being said of traditional team sports. Though athletes of incredible talent and super-human skill may command a mythos within different sports cultures (Michael Jordan in basketball, Babe Ruth in baseball and Roger Federer in tennis, to name a few), they are considered more than anything masters of their craft—innovators within it perhaps—but they were all ultimately confined by the pre-made rules of their sport. Jordan, Ruth and Federer, unlike Ladd, didn’t exactly take their sport anywhere.

Similarities between passion and flow in the moment

Having made this detour, let me now more directly respond to the question about the similarities and differences between passion and Mihaly Csíkszentmihályi’s theory of “flow.” There are certainly many similarities between Csíkszentmihályi’s concept and my own.

Flow describes an “optimal experience,” which is frequently felt by those pursuing their passion. When someone is in flow, they concentrate deeply on “the moment,” caught up in the pleasure and challenge of an immediate task; they clear their minds of all else. Both flow and passion welcome this state because it offers intrinsic satisfaction and enjoyment in our everyday lives.  However, the differences become apparent as soon as one moves beyond the moment itself and attempts to identify the factors that lead up to “optimal experience.”

Differences between passion and flow - the context

Csíkszentmihályi emphasizes that in order to achieve flow, we must pick goals that have meaning (in either our personal or professional lives), determine the structure it sets out for us (the terms of both games and work), and then play by rules. In other words, Csíkszentmihályi prefers we stay in-bounds and are well-behaved on the courts, slopes and fields.

Csíkszentmihályi writes: 

One finds more occasions of [flow] on the job than in free time . . . this finding is not that surprising. What often passes unnoticed is that work is much more like a game than most other things we do during the day. It usually has clear goals and rules of performance. . . Thus, work tends to have the structure of other intrinsically rewarding activities that provide flow, such as games, sports, music, and art. (59, Finding Flow.)

And elsewhere he writes:

Flow tends to occur when a person faces a clear set of goals that require appropriate response. It is easy to enter flow in games such as chess, tennis, or poker, because they have goals and rules for action that make possible for the player to act without questioning what should be done, and how.   (29, Finding Flow) 

An example of this sporting mindset appears in Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, where Csíkszentmihályi cites the example of a factory worker named Rico Medellin. Csíkszentmihályi explains, “The task he has to perform on each unit that passes in from of his station should take forty-three seconds to perform—the same exact operation almost six hundred times in a working day” (Flow, 39). Rico manages to enjoy this laborious and monotonous work 5 years into the job because he approaches it like a game—attempting daily to beat his own record. Playing by the rules of the game is cited time and again as a key access point for achieving flow—and Rico has certainly mastered this. 

Csíkszentmihályi tends to focus on the problem of psychic disorder, the chaos of psychic entropy and, in this context, views flow as an effective way to bring order to the natural state of psychic entropy – it is about imposing order to make progress. MC defines the autotelic personality as “the ability to create flow experience even in the most barren environment” (149, Flow), where, “In theory, any job could be changed as to make it more enjoyable by following the prescriptions of the flow model” (154, Flow).

To say, then, that Rico actually enjoys his job is misleading. Rico has merely managed to make his job bearable by ordering his consciousness through rule-making and goal-setting, which makes it possible for him to forget, in the moment, everything else (in Rico’s case, I imagine that would include working on an assembly line for 5+ years). Rico’s process may be an exemplar of Csíkszentmihályi’s “optimal experience,” but he as the antithesis of the passionate one. To mistake the two is to mistake “coping,” with “thriving.”

Passion is not about finding work bearable. It is the process by which people get in touch with their true loves in life and fearlessly pursue them, motivated by the opportunities and spaces for development, which often require that they ignore any rules that get in their way of achieving that potential. It is about love.

Like flow, increasing “complexity” and seeking challenge is typical of pursuing passion but the motivation behind these endeavors have crucial differences: where Csíkszentmihályi would have us tame chaos and uncertainty, passion energizes us to embrace dynamic systems and explore the unknown. How can we take ourselves where we are going?

Back to the edge

The emergent star of the 2010 Olympics was surely snowboarder Shaun White for his daring move, the “Double McTwist 1260.” What astonished viewers and boarders alike was the fact that no one had done this before (at least at the level of international exposure). White had already secured the gold before this drastic stunt—a fact that might have  prompted others to “play it safe.” But White dared to push the boundaries nevertheless. Accepting medals on podiums may be reward enough for some, but for a boarder as dedicated as White, the passionate drive to explore new possibilities was far too tempting. Watch the White’s great Olympic moment here. 

We shouldn’t be too surprised after this display that a number of snowboarders were already showing off their own versions of the Double McTwist 1260 at the U.S. Open Snowboarding Championships only about a month after White made set the bar. White, however, was conspicuously absent from the event. As the New York Times reports, he’s taking it to the streets—setting plans for a competitive skateboard season where he plans to develop some new tricks. Among them the 1080, “a maneuver that has never been landed in a skateboarding competition.”