This is a posting in The Fish Pond Metaphor series by Ali Anani and Bas de Baar.
The image we like to have of our understanding of globalization is the one popularized by Thomas Friedman, that of a flattened world, in which economic development or potential are equally spread all over the world. Although we would love to believe this, the reality is different. “Globalization has changed the economic playing field, but hasn’t leveled it”, argues Richard Florida is his article “The World Is Spiky“.
Photography by Jaros?aw Pocztarski.
Using several different ways of looking at the globe results always in the same pattern: economic development is clustered, large urban areas create a so-called spike.
In Florida’s opinion economic development is created by technology, talent and tolerance. These are known as the Three 3Ts Of Economic Development. These three factors create a proper environment for what he calls “the creative class“, the occupations that trigger economic development (Computer and mathematical occupations, Architecture and engineering occupations, Life, physical, and social science occupations, Education, training, and library occupations, Arts, design, entertainment, sports, and media occupations).
This clustering of people is a topic we have previously discussed in the context of The Fish Pond. People have a social and economic need to sit close together. We also mentioned the need for performing OODA loops to enable successful adaption to changes.
By combining the mentioned observations we see that having economic development and being able to adapt are related topics. In other words, Being on a spike means you are highly adaptive, being highly adaptive puts you on a spike.
Back to the Three Ts Of Economic Development:
- Technology provides fast and easy access information.
- Talent provides fabulous agents in your network (great minds)
- Tolerance provides open-mindedness for diversity and other opinions.
These are all ingredients for having fast access to diverse flow of information and social constructs. Therefore having a great OODA loop, resulting in incredible adaption. As long as these are timely and effective the resulting OODA loops and adaptation will have a greater chance of survival.
Photography by loufi.
In the following example we illustrate how this might work.
Say you are living on a small rural village in Jordan, somewhere in a dessert. You have internet access, a telephone, you speak English and have all the skills that are in high demand. You don’t know anyone outside your village. You start calling people up using the phone book and start by the letter A-Z… every week you learn one person that is connected with something you want to do.
You move to the capital, the city of Amman. You attend a small seminar and meet 100 people . All relevant people that can help you out in getting what you want. Those 100 people also know people, and because they are all in that city everyone’s networks accelerate by the growth of anyone else’s network. Being in the center of economic activity, being on the spike, acts like a tornado, it sucks everything to it.
The social network brings you information, an opinion of the information, perspective on the information.
Connections between people emerge. But they also dissolve, either because of a changing need, but also because there is a limit to the amount of relationships a person can effectively keep. Actually, it is not just the size of the network, but of course also quality of the people in it. People on the spike have more choice of connections, and therefore can make a better selection of the connections that are kept.
Being on a spike increases the network in size and quality. Staying on a spike creates exponential growth of the network size and quality.
After a year you can move back to the rural village in the desert. You take your network with you. Creating your own small spike. You are reversing the process. You will need to create the conditions in which the other spikes emerged (remember the 3Ts):
- Attract talent (reach out to stimulate great minds)
- Stimulate diversity and tolerance
- Create technology infrastructure for information access and storage.
Ali Anani got his PhD in chemistry in the UK (1972). As of 1981 Dr. Anani got interested in applying scientific approaches to economic and social issues.
Bas de Baar, blogging as “The Project Shrink“, is taking his message to the International Project Management community with a vengeance: “Projects Are About Humans. Now Deal With That!”
Dr Anani
Great article. I am currently in the process of migrating my network from a samll metro spike in Melbourne to one in regional Australia.
This post was the second one on my blog and also discusses the imbalances of the globalizing economy.
Basically if you are European or North American glbalization comes with pelnty of benefits, but the lower you are on the economic pecking order, the more likely you will be unfairly exploited.
Unfairly. Now there’s a loaded term.
Dear Dr. Brown,
I want to thank you for your remarkable comment.
I also encourage evry reader to read your post that has a linkage in your reply. In particular. and I quote your post, In reality economies and cultures that already have a critical mass are able to grow their ‘market share’ at the expense of less developed cultures and economies. Yes, we do see things eye to eye even evough we approach the same issue from different directions.
In response to a comment by phone enquiring about the limits of possible adaptation. This is an interesting comment that I would like to share with the readers.
Adaptability suffers from what has been termed “The Red Queen Effect”. In summary if you keep runnung in a landscape at the same rate of others you seem to stick at your starting point. It is important to adapt much faster than others to feel the progress. The rate of adaptation is crucial. Besides, as long as you have more choices than the environment in which you are working then adaptability comes to a halt. To adapt, you must generate alternatives.
So if you stay on the same path you have to run harder and harder. It’s better to change path (or start looking for one)?
That is correct, Bas. Strategy is knowing where you stand and to where you are going from your starting position. People get busy developing performance indicators to gauge their progress on their set direction. But, we know from complexity routes that the future holds many scenarios. How may we assume following one and pre-determined future path? We need to open our eyes to all possibilities and keep learning from experiences and trial and error.
In summary, complexity science opens our minds and eyes to the many possibilities of the future. To assume or pre-select one path means that we may control our destiny. Can we do that in reality?