🌐✨The Nexialist #0049
2022 Trends Reports | The Complex Mind | At the Height of Complexity | Modern Paradoxes | Asynchronous Work | Generational Death | Flight for Sagittarius | Conscience and Purpose
Welcome to another week of not-so-random-quite-intentional links that I want to share with you,
Hello, my dear readers! I’ll skip the intro today and lead you directly to the filling of this cookie called The Nexialist. Enjoy!
🧠The Complex Mind
Season 2 of The Mind, Explained came out on Netflix. This is one of those series that I sing along with the opening credits and I get chills (or even teary eyes) when the episode finishes. Needless to say, I was super happy with each episode: How to Focus, Teenage Brain, Personality, Creativity and Brainwashing. One of the messages that stayed with me: embrace complexity, question simplicity.
🌐At the Height of Complexity
Recently I found this post announcing a new column “by novelist and tech writer Tim Maughan about how to understand a world governed by systems and technologies that are spiraling out of control.” Since I read this, I cannot stop thinking about the title: The Modern World Has Finally Become Too Complex for Any of Us to Understand.
So, what we’ve ended up with is a civilization built on the constant flow of physical goods, capital, and data, and the networks we’ve built to manage those flows in the most efficient ways have become so vast and complex that they’re now beyond the scale of any single (and, arguably, any group or team of) human understanding them. It’s tempting to think of these networks as huge organisms, with tentacles spanning the globe that touch everything and interlink with one another, but I’m not sure the metaphor is apt. An organism suggests some form of centralized intelligence, a nervous system with a brain at its center, processing data through feedback loops and making decisions. But the reality with these networks is much closer to the concept of distributed intelligence or distributed knowledge, where many different agents with limited information beyond their immediate environment interact in ways that lead to decision-making, often without them even knowing that’s what they’re doing.
Read: The Modern World Has Finally Become Too Complex for Any of Us to Understand
🙃Modern Paradoxes
Since I signed up for David Perell’s newsletter, I always learn something new with his pieces. Since I was talking about paradoxes recently here in The Nexialist, I feel David and I tuned in to the same frequency. It’s lovely to see how he came up with different paradoxes of Modern Life. I’ll leave a couple below:
The Paradox of Originality: Many of history’s greatest artists have found their voice by copying others. We discover who we are by imitating others and watching our uniqueness emerge over time.
The Productivity Paradox: We keep inventing things that save us time, but it feels like we have less time than ever before.
Read: The Paradoxes of Modern Life - David Perell
💻Asynchronous Work
Last month I finished Officeless’ course on Remote Leadership and learned about quite a few tools and mindsets to help remote teams and leaders. I have been working remotely for about 5 years, so some things I already learned (the hard way), so it was great to have a guide, validation on some of my processes (NO WHATSAPP!) and also learn new things.
This HBR article from Steve Glaveski brought important points: Remote Work Should Be (Mostly) Asynchronous. He brings some important tools to make work more efficient and less interrupted: task boards, office hours and scheduling tools, shared documents, instant messaging plugins, etc.
The pandemic accelerated many trends, from streaming, e-commerce, and food delivery platforms to the widespread adoption of remote work. But instead of taking advantage of this opportunity to improve how we work, most organizations simply took their offices online, along with the bad habits that permeated them. A move to a better way of working remotely is desperately needed. If your digital transformation is going to be successful, you need to give your employees the right tools and systems to work in a digital, distributed, virtual environment. However, digital tools are only as effective as how effectively you use them, and alignment between managers and employees on remote work best practices will be critical to the success of any digital transformation initiative.
Read: Remote Work Should Be (Mostly) Asynchronous - HBR
☮️Generational Death
Since I started studying Advertising and Communication more than a decade ago, there was already a discussion about generations and segmentation. Oldschool professors loved the easy demographic divisions, while the younger digital professors were telling us that behavioral segmentation was more relevant at the internet age. Here we are in 2021, and still debating this. It’s great to see how “youth culture” came to exist historically. I think, again, we want the simplicity of dividing people into generations, but the world is more complex than that.
The question, therefore, is not “Are generations real?” The question is “Are they a helpful way to understand anything?”
Bobby Duffy, the author of “The Generation Myth” (Basic), says yes, but they’re not as helpful as people think. Duffy is a social scientist at King’s College London. His argument is that generations are just one of three factors that explain changes in attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. The others are historical events and “life-cycle effects,” that is, how people change as they age. His book illustrates, with a somewhat overwhelming array of graphs and statistics, how events and aging interact with birth cohort to explain differences in racial attitudes, happiness, suicide rates, political affiliations—you name it, for he thinks that his three factors explain everything.
Read: It’s Time to Stop Talking About Generations by Louis Menand, The New Yorker
♐️Flight for Sagittarius
I could not leave out the new video from Diogo Strausz after reading this, from the piece above:
Studies have consistently indicated that people do not become more conservative as they age. As Duffy shows, however, some people find entry into adulthood delayed by economic circumstances. This tends to differentiate their responses to survey questions about things like expectations. Eventually, he says, everyone catches up. In other words, if you are basing your characterization of a generation on what people say when they are young, you are doing astrology. You are ascribing to birth dates what is really the result of changing conditions.
🎯Conscience and Purpose
As soon as I saw this title, I had to click: Everyone Has a Purpose, Few Have a Conscience. I felt so relatable because a few times in my career working in agencies, I felt like my team and I was, at many times, the ones making sure our brands had a conscience. You know when you see a campaign that went wrong and think: not one person in the team saw that it was not ok? We were that filter. So it’s nice to see Cristian Saracco validating that.
…By this, what I mean is that everyone has a purpose, even the Mafia, yet few have a conscience and even fewer are specific in the way they define it.
Consciousness needs sincerity rather than authenticity
For a company, being true to itself means being concerned, admitting vulnerability, and making bold choices. For example, stopping collaborating with other firms that do not meet a company’s standards of conduct; assuming responsibility for mistakes that affect society; abandoning businesses that are no longer legitimate. In other words, being consistent between what the company thinks, does, and says.
Behaving truthfully and being unapologetically driven by values are two of the essential characteristics that today’s society is demanding from each institution.
Read: Everyone Has a Purpose, Few Have a Conscience - BrandingMag
🔭2022 Trend Reports
Isn’t it amazing when a group of people decide to do something nice and share? This year, Amy, Baiba, Ci En, Gonzalo and Iolanda, Strategists from Asia and Europe created a Google Drive Folder with 2022 Trends Reports from across agency, consulting and business industries.
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