Discover your space for disruption

Ever since I founded Minkowski a couple of years ago, people have been asking me about that name: who is it and why have you named your company after him? The reason is because he (unknowingly) has created our blueprint for the way we look at the future and transformation. Transformation is not about disruptively changing course midstream, but rather about exploring possibilities for the future and taking steps towards it that align with what your organization is capable of.

Who is Minkowski?

The first time I came in touch with Minkowski was years ago when I briefly collaborated with Joe Pine during the time of his book on authenticity. The name disappeared to the back of my mind until 2017. Hermann Minkowski was a German mathematician and one of Albert Einstein’s teachers. He showed that Einstein’s theory of special relativity could best be understood as a theory of four-dimensional space-time. This understanding is known as Minkowski spacetime. Minkowski illustrated that there is only a cone of possible positions a particle can move to in the future. Namely it can not move faster than light and cannot go back in time. The position of the particle in the future is therefor determined by where it is now and where it is coming from.

How do you apply this to business?

When you apply this to business it means that your future is in fact determined by your past. Where you can transform to in the future as an organization is determined by your heritage and the capacities and capabilities you have as an organization today. The possible positions in the future that this can lead to Minkowski calls a ‘cone of possibility’. In our work with clients we explore this cone of possibilities in their future and design paths that match their past and present. This way you increase the chance of actually being able to take the necessary steps for change and transformation, rather than being blinded and overwhelmed with what is possible. Disruption is only possible when you want and are able to transform.

What is an example?

Let’s take a big supermarket chain as a hypothetical example. Inspired by all the technologies of the future it could think that autonomous vehicles is THE thing for the future. Then theoretically they could fire all their employees, hire a bunch of engineers and start developing such a car. When they succeed nobody will probably like to drive a supermarket branded car, so they have to re-brand it. Technically they’ve then become a different company. So, what this supermarket chain can do with autonomous technology is determined by who they are and what they are capable of. Yes, there are possibilities for autonomous technology to be used by this company, but how and what is limited by their own ‘cone of possibility’.

Why Minkowski?

But that is not the only reason why we are calling ourselves Minkowski. Minkowski was also a teacher. He merely was one of the people that helped Einstein become Einstein. That is our ambition: we are not looking to be in the limelight, we rather help others reach their future. The art of facilitating such a process is embedded deep in our DNA. Nobody knows Minkowski, but everyone knows Einstein. It is thus our ambition to enable a million Einsteins to change and transform  the world.

Written by Jörgen van der Sloot

Founder & Head of Futures at Minkowski

Strategy design: Strategy is a design process

Written by Jörgen van der Sloot

Founder & Head of Futures at Minkowski

Backwards into the future, or forwards to the present?

One of my New Year’s resolutions is to launch a few (writing) projects (I’ve tried this before with various degrees of perseverance by the way). One of them is about the Lessera, the other is to share more of the methods we use at Minkowski to apply the future to the present, such as with the Cone of Possibilities. Some of you have told me to write that up in a book, but I’m parking that idea for the moment as I think a book is a little too static of a medium for the work I’m doing at the moment. Instead, I’ll share what we do in this short post. Let me know if that works for you.

Solutions for the lessera: less is more?

Somebody responded to my previous post asking me whether doing less was not automatically leading to doing more of something else? Eating less meat, means you eat more vegetables. Driving less in a car, means you bike more. Less days of education for your kids, means you get to spend more time with your kids. Even though this is of course true, I think the lessera is more than just replacing the ‘bad’ with something else: it’s also a cultural change or a change in mindset for the individual.

Changing mindset: being satisfied with less

If we would rephrase the mindset of less into doing more of something else then we are not really changing the way we live and think about the world. Then we still believe there is no limit to progress and that we can still get more. That mindset is still a material mindset.

What I am in fact arguing is that we’ve reached the limits of growth and that we have to learn how to adjust to that mentally and materially. This is a cultural and mental shift for the whole of society and a shift in ourselves. Perhaps we could say that it requires us to be more aware of the world around us and how we are impacting that world with our desires for more material wealth. Even though this might start with the individual, it is a systemic change that will ripple through every layer of our society (most likely starting at the ’top’).

I’m personally leading a life at the top of Maslov’s pyramid, but still I strive for more and better. But why? Why can’t I be satisfied with what I have right now? Isn’t enough enough? Can I learn how to be satisfied with less? I think one start of a solution for the lessera lies within that mental shift. It’s easier said than done. How are you changing your own mindset from ‘less is more’ to ‘less is enough’?

Written by Jörgen van der Sloot

Founder & Head of Futures at Minkowski

2020: The lessera – start of the era of less

It’s the end of the year: a time of reflection. We are about to enter the year 2020. A year that has been a future horizon in many strategic sessions I’ve hosted over the past 15 years. And now we are there…close to a future once imagined. Something has been in the back of my mind for quite a while now: are we nearing the end of progress as we’ve seen it until now? Especially in the Netherlands, the country I live in, with the density of the population and infrastructure, the economic value that is generated here and the spur of innovation that is taking place, the question becomes: how far can we keep on pushing the boundaries? My feeling is we can’t anymore… We are entering the Lessera.

Entering the lessera

The signs around me all point to a new mindset and a new reality that has been slowly taking root. At the brink of 2020 we are entering the era of less. For lack of a better word I’ll call it the lessera.

We have to start living in a world that is emitting less CO2; we have to reduce the amount of nitrogen emissions; will we see less agriculture as a result of that, will we build less? We are going to drive slower; we have to eat less meat; my daughter will soon get fewer days of education during the week; and the list can go on and on. This is all taking place right now, at this moment. The Netherlands, because of its limited size, might very well be one of the first countries in the world that is running into the limits of progress. And the question is: can we avoid a collision that stops us dead in our tracks?

Doing more with less?

Our societies are wired for ‘more’. We want to make more money; live in better houses; have more space; make more profit; get better education; be more innovative; etc. And for decades we’ve brainwashed ourselves that this was possible. We could rebuild an entire continent after a war and make life better for everyone. Technological advancements created opportunities for everyone to create the life you wanted…whatever you wanted.

But that is no longer true for everyone. We have to learn how to do more with less. That sounds like a lame thing to say, an open door maybe, but I think that we really have to start to figure that out with each other. How might we really do more with less? The generation growing up right now will be the first generation that will be less wealthy than their parents. What world will they live in? Am I really willing to keep on pursuing my own dreams of a more successful life while my kids can no longer receive the education they need to make a living in the future, or live in a house that they can afford?

The pursuit

I don’t have the answer to this wicked problem or any of the underlying questions for that matter. But figuring some of them out in 2020 will be an important pursuit. And this post is a shoutout to all of you that feel this too. If you are willing to join us and help design solutions for the lessera please let us know! We are looking for collaborators to build a road towards a more sustainable future, and figure out how to do this. If you know of someone we should talk to, let us know.

Something to contemplate over during the holidays maybe. Best of whishes for 2020 to all of you. I’m looking forward to new horizons for the decades to come…

Written by Jörgen van der Sloot

Founder & Head of Futures at Minkowski

Yesterday’s tomorrow

The future is ever changing and it can feel daunting to think about what might happen next or how to adapt as a person or organization to the changes that will occur. What can you do to identify patterns for the future? One thing is to make things smaller and start training a futures mindset so you become more awake to change. Change happens yes, but it’s not always disruptive. Just spot the little differences that are less dramatic and realize that the future is only yesterday’s tomorrow.

Change blindness

Change blindness is a phenomenon to illustrate our inability to identify visual changes. Even when such changes are dramatic we sometimes fail to notice them. This is simply because we are focused on something else or because the change is too gradual. There are many examples online where you can test how good you are in seeing things change.

When you take this phenomenon to business it becomes evident why it is that we often fail to see ’the next big thing’ or when we miss out on something that seems so obvious years later. People often ask me how they can become better at noticing these changes. One thing that works is to change your perspective often. Talk to people from a different industry, talk to your customers, talk to your recent hires and ask them what they see. This is a great way to avoid some of the change blindness that otherwise might occur (as soon as somebody tells you there was a gorilla running through the crowd in one of the examples above you can never not see it anymore). But you also have to accept that you can never see it all.

Do it yourself

However, I also think that you can train yourself to become better at noticing changes. One way that I am experimenting with this is to make myself more aware of change by logging the differences in my observations. Lately I have begun to do this by seeing today as a metaphor for the future of yesterday. This helps me experiment with more awareness for the changes that then occur. What I do is I keep a ‘journal’ and each day. I write down the answers to 3 questions (that I limit to a business perspective for now):

1. what do I think is going to happen tomorrow;
2. what signal do I see for this;
3. what do I sense will change from today?

Then the next day (the future) I look back on these notes to see what actually happened and how far off I was. By simply writing my ‘predictions’ down and reflecting on how those differ from what happened, makes me more aware of the changes.

Interestingly, at the start I was always completely off. The things that I had written down were way too big and dramatic. After a while, when I started to make it smaller and took my calendar as a guide, I became better at it. I made myself aware of the small perceptual changes. In a way it is training some type of ‘hyper awareness for change’, which is one ingredient that can help organizations become better at reacting to change with agility. Try it out and see what it does for you.

New plan or new direction?

One of our clients recently told me: “we have executed the plan we crafted three years ago, so now we need a new plan”. Kudos for them for the execution power they have. It is nice to see that a plan that was developed years ago actually leads to tangible action and change. But the question is: do they need a new plan or do they need a new direction? Without a good sense of direction, the chances of the new plan being executed as effectively as the old one are a lot smaller. As the old Japanese saying goes: “a vision without a plan is just a dream, a plan without vision is a nightmare”.

Being courageous

To do-lists are a great way to organize your days, generate energy and get a sense of accomplishment. In many self-help books organizing your days and creating small goals that you can accomplish are widely promoted. And yes, it helps if you know what to do today. With the emergence of lean- and agile approaches in organizations the focus on getting things done is growing in popularity too. But when you get too much caught up in today, you forget to look at tomorrow. And before you know it, you run out of todo’s for today.

However, it takes guts to look beyond tomorrow, to push the boundaries to the next frontier and challenge your organization to think ahead of the curve. For the people that are doing this in organizations it can often feel like they’re saying: “let’s step away from the things that we do well. That will give us such a great feeling of being on the right track”. Very often that then creates discomfort, anxiety and resistance. You have to be bold and tough enough to take on that role. And lead your coworkers to a new direction.

See, believe, think and then act

Thankfully the organization that I was referring to in the opening is bold enough to look at the next horizon. They are even energized to go there and explore what the future might hold for them. The philosophy that we hold dear in our approach has taken root in this organization: they want to see the new, and challenge the beliefs they hold about today, so they can think differently about what’s next and then draft a plan for action again. This is a continuous loop that keeps you moving forward.

A new plan can only emerge from a new view on the world on a next horizon. Otherwise your execution power will put a drain on your energy. Your employees will loose a sense of purpose and nobody will understand what to do next. Make sure to step into the future on time, but never forget keep acting today.

Written by Jörgen van der Sloot

Founder & Head of Futures at Minkowski

Strategy = dialogue

The end of the year is often the moment when people start making plans for the time to come. At Minkowski we see this first hand as the questions for help in developing strategic plans increase at the end of each year leading into the next year (maybe it’s just a coincidence that this coincides with making New Year’s resolutions). However, a strategy is never set in stone. You never make a strategic plan to lock it up in a drawer never to look at again (although I expect this happens a lot). For us strategy is dialogue: a multi-dimensional, dynamic and context-dependent process of creating meaning for an organization. It is something that should be ongoing as the context of any business is always changing.

Culture eats strategy for breakfast

It’s an often quoted phrase of Peter Drucker, illustrating that even though your plans can be great, if you don’t pay attention to the company culture, any plan will fail. It reminds me of another great quote of Mark Twain: “in theory there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is”.

Why do I mention these two quotes: because it illustrates that ‘a plan’ should be something fluid. Your strategy never sits in a vacuum (unless it really disappeared in that drawer). It should always be adapted to the culture of the company on an ongoing basis. It should always be adapted to the practice it runs into. That’s why we see strategic planning more as a process of creating meaning: it tells everyone in the organization what it is that they’re working towards. A good strategy is rather a conversation starter than it is the conclusion of a long planning process. If it is the latter, then by the time everyone is in the know, it is already old again. Meaning that it should be adapted again.

Facilitating an ongoing process: turning ‘strategy’ into a verb

So, ‘strategy’ is an ongoing process. We should begin to see the word ‘strategy’ as a verb as you should always be working it. The strategic consultant is then someone who facilitates the dialogue about the direction the company is taking. We believe that this is something that anyone can do or can learn to do (and preferably inside your company). We apply principles of design thinking to strategy, so that you are able to use your strategy as a framework for making decisions, having conversations, continuously adapting and iterating it. If you approach strategy like this, it becomes an effective tool for change and transformation from within and not a nice document that is lying around somewhere.

Perhaps you might even succeed in rephrasing Drucker’s quote to “strategy = culture (and vice versa)”.

Reach out to us if you want to train strategy facilitators in your organization and use strategy design as a new approach to your strategic planning practices.

Written by Jörgen van der Sloot

Founder & Head of Futures at Minkowski

The reversal of social media

There are more and more coffee places, bars and restaurants that are actively proclaiming they don’t want you to be there on your laptop or smart phone. There are special sections in these places where it is or isn’t allowed. Combine that with a growing supply of retreats without technology in nature (at least my timeline is filled with dozens of offers) and holidays without technology and you might conclude that we’ve had enough of technology and especially social media distracting us from a meaningful life. Social media is turning into ego-media and the only proper medicine for it is to turn it off completely. Or so it seems. Welcome to the future…

The effects of technology on society

There’s a theory that nicely explains what is happening here: McLuhan’s Tetrad of Media Effects. McLuhan developed his theory to examine the effects of media on society. He wrote his tetrad as questions, but to go short, he argues that (new) technology enhances something, it makes (old) things obsolete, it retrieves something from the past and puts that right back center stage and then finally when the new technology is pushed to its extremes it reverses or flips in the opposite direction. You can find many examples plotted in these four quadrants online.

Social media making the social obsolete?

If you look at social media it first enhances our means of expressing ourselves to bigger audiences and allows us to have a connection with many more people than ever before. But at the same time, these connections happen more and more in a digital space. People are looking more at their smartphones than they are looking at each other (in any public space for that matter). And then pushed to its extreme it actually flips on its head. In the aforementioned coffee bars and restaurants you can observe something that can perhaps best be characterized as ego-media instead of social media.

Which leaves one open media effect: what does ‘social media’ retrieve from the past? Any thoughts or ideas on that? I’d be curious to find out what you think…

Written by Jörgen van der Sloot

Founder & Head of Futures at Minkowski

Fall in love with the problem, not the idea

As part of our work we help people to think big and be bold and courageous to step into a new future and change the(ir) world. You might think that this means you have to come up with a grand idea and follow that dream always. But it is actually the opposite: you have to find a big problem and work on solving that. We always say: you have to fall in love with the problem (not the idea).

Falling in love with a problem

It is always tempting to focus on solutions. Ideas generate energy and with great ideas especially, there always seems to be a market for them. Or at least, in your head there is always a market for them. Very often organizations that are launching one product after the other (or are focused on the one product or service that they’ve always sold) tend to forget to ask themselves a very basic question: what is the problem we are solving with this idea?

If you can not answer that question, then what is the relevance for your customer? Are you trying to sell them something that doesn’t have any real value? Or are you making up a problem for them in order to sell your thing? If that is the case, I think you will find it very hard to dream big and come up with something that can truly change the world. And it is not as if there are no problems to solve. There are many problems and challenges out there that you could spend a lifetime on solving. Find one of those and try to come up with solutions for it (these problems can also be your organizational problems by the way).

That is why all of our sessions start with identifying a problem that people can relate to: a problem that they are motivated to solve. Once you’ve found a really difficult problem that almost seems impossible to solve and are willing to stick to, you can start dreaming big. Why? Because it will take a bold idea to solve that impossible problem.

Generating bold ideas

Never fall in love with the first solution you find for your problem! In the end you might find that this was the best solution after all. But when you go for one idea too fast, you limit your chances of finding better ones. Bigger problems always have more than one solution to move things forward. Magic bullet solutions don’t really exist.  Very often you need more than one idea to solve something (especially when it concerns wicked problems like the SDG’s for instance). Moreover, very often some incubation time helps to generate better solutions (this is called the “incubation effect“).

So don’t start acting upon the very first idea. Allow yourself and your organization a little more space to think of the next solution, and the next, and the next… Then keep those solutions alive for some time, so you can reflect on them, learn from them and develop the best ones into really valuable products and services. After all, it is not about the solutions you sell, but the problems you solve.

Written by Jörgen van der Sloot

Founder & Head of Futures at Minkowski