As we shift towards Vendor Relationship Management, taking control of how we deal with the companies that we buy from, it is likely that we will consolidate our relationships towards a single intermediary that adds the most value to us.

Assistants become more valuable as they learn more about us, in building a true ‘knowledge-based’ relationship. This of course requires trust. The main voice assistants so far have been the likes of Siri and Alexa, however major tech companies are definitely not attracting trust these days. As I have written:

Once virtual assistants understand not just us but the context for our questions and interactions they will become increasingly valuable to us. This will create a form of lock-in, where there is a cost to switching from the assistants that know us the best and are thus able to better personalize our experience.

However this requires trust in how that personal knowledge will be used. The winners in the virtual assistant space can only win if they engender sufficient trust for individuals to be happy sharing not just their interactions, but their entire context.

The ultimate potential value is being at the center of all of our commercial relationships, as I told CEO Magazine for an article on Virtual Personal Assistants (VPA):

“The reality is that the value in creating a very functional VPA is going to be greater in providing it for everyone than to a limited audience. “These VPAs become people’s primary interface to everything. You could ask them things like ‘Can you book me that restaurant?’, or ‘Can you buy me that book that I would like for my upcoming trip?’, and they will be able to provide those functions.”

Therein, according to Dawson, lies the reason why the tech giants are in this market.“It will become your primary interface to commerce,” he says. “That is extraordinarily valuable and why each of the major technology companies all have significant play. Arguably this is the future of almost all commerce.”

Now new players are endeavoring to build this incredibly high-value relationships with us using primarily human assistants. Steven Levy writes in Wired about a new service called Yohana intended to take workload off busy mothers.

Here’s the way Yohana works. For $149 a month, subscribers get access to an actual human being working as kind of a personal factotum, relentlessly checking off the joyless tasks (and even some joyful ones) that either eat up hours of the day or don’t get done at all.
…
The subscription fee is a loss-leader for what will become a thriving ecosystem of services. Think of it as an Amazon marketplace, only with services instead of products. “We’re building our own network of pros, the kind of people who get five stars on Yelp,” she says. “We see ourselves as a one-stop shop.” So the Maggies of Yohana will be able to tap a network of plumbers, electricians, and florists—who will kick back a percentage of the fees to the company.

Yohana and its primary backer Panasonic clearly see the potential of becoming the dominant relationship for their customers, and believe that human assistants, supported by AI, can beat the current AI-only offers.

It is interesting to hark back to Facebook’s early foray into online assistants, M, which was launched in 2015 and shuttered in 2018, having only ever had 2,000 invited users. The intention was to use the human assistants’ responses to its customers to train AI to do the same job, but the venture never succeeded.

In a similar vein, online clothing retailer Stitch Fix employs 5000 human stylists supported by AI (and 150 data scientists) to build powerful, lasting relationships with their customers.

It is a very fair point that humans (supported by AI) are far more likely to be able to build trusting knowledge-based relationships than pure AI apps. Once those relationships are established there is the potential to migrate them to AI-only as capabilities evolve, especially where price is an issue.

It will be very interesting to see how Yohana goes, but I expect there will be other significant players in the human + AI assistant space. The potential rewards are massive.

“We have for-profit organisations, which increasingly are trying to have a social impact, and we have not-for-profits legislated to reinvest all their profits,” says Dawson.

“But there is incredible power in the model of giving away 50%.”

The runaway success of Who Gives a Crap

The most well-known example is toilet paper success story Who Gives a Crap, which in 2020 donated more than US$4 million to help build toilets in the developing world.

In a podcast interview Who Gives a Crap co-founder and CEO Simon Griffiths said the owners always wanted impact to be core to their business, but they landed on 50% for a few key reasons. It allowed the organisation to generate enough cashflow to keep the business alive while also making large donations at the end of each financial year.

“It also gave us the benefit of being able to have equity in the business,” says Griffiths, something a nonprofit is unable to offer.  

“We thought it would allow us to grow more than twice as quickly than we could if we were a nonprofit…we could potentially sell equity to get capital into the business to help us grow, but it also allowed us to incentivise staff who in the early days are often joining us on a lower salary than what they may be able to earn somewhere else.”

Griffiths hopes the company’s model will inspire other business owners seeking to solve big social problems.

“We believe that if we’re going to go about solving these huge social problems we have to show there’s a business model that will be able to work and attract investment from investors and entrepreneurs who are interested in creating impact but also want to create a financial return for themselves.

“If we can show that’s possible with our business model that’s how we’ll attract tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands more entrepreneurs into the space, which is ultimately going to create the impact necessary to solve these massive social issues that we have globally.”

Radical transparency in action

Dawson says it’s a form of transparency which engages customers in understanding truly how much an organisation is supporting the community. And it exposes exactly how much profit, even if private, a company is making.

“Those that say in vague terms they give away part of their profits or revenues, it’s often fractional, whereas a commitment of 50% means you know how much is going to go to the communities in need and it’s written into the company’s constitution.”

The model is seen in a variety of businesses, from small organisations like Goodwill Wine, to US investment management firm Bridgeway Capital, which has more than US$7.5 billion in assets under management.

Bridgeway Capital founder John Montgomery says it was naive to pick 50% when he started the firm in 1993, but “it’s ten times more powerful than I believed at the time”. 

Why? Because the firm is able to attract more people to work for it and keep them for longer.

Campaign-based donations also work

Social enterprise The Good Beer Company based its launch on a specific product being linked to a specific cause. In 2015 the company crowdfunded its way into existence with its maiden product the “Great Barrier Beer” and a commitment to donate 50% of profits made on the beer to the Australian Marine Conservation Society.

Today the company has a diverse offering of beers for multiple causes. It has since shifted away from 50% of profits to 10% of sales.

“There are any number of possible variations in how much companies contribute to worthwhile causes. The most common are 0% and 100%. But there does seem to be a kind of magic to giving 50%, perfectly balanced between the two extremes,” says Dawson.

Social technologies made organizations more different

In the first instance this divergence has been fueled over the last dozen years by organizations implementing social technologies to add a differentiated layer of ad-hoc networks to the existing commoditized layer of standardized processes.

Social technologies can be used by the people they connect in an unlimited number of ways.

In many organizations they have amplified – or made manifest – existing cultures of collaboration, or of lack of trust.

In every case they have been used differently and shaped organizations to be more unique.

Configurations of remote and office work

Overlaid on the highly varied use of social technologies, we have seen an increasingly broad spectrum of the use of remote work, from completely office-less companies such as Automattic or Toptal through to the many companies that until recently allowed no work from home.

Today amid the COVID-19 pandemic, almost every organization has been forced to shift to almost completely virtual work.

The path and timeframe for being able to return to daily office are highly uncertain, and will be different across countries, regions, and cities.

Yet as we shift back to a world a little closer to what we have experienced in the past, there will be a plethora of possible configurations for work.

As I wrote recently, organizations and employees can and will innovate in their balance between office, home, and ‘third-space’ workplaces, generating vastly different organizational structures and styles.

The relative roles of humans and AI

Another dimension of potentially massive differences between organizations is the role of AI in value creation.

Some companies are already focusing on maximizing automation and minimizing staff, while others are either deliberately or through inertia retaining traditional work roles.

Yet between these extremes there are a multitude of possibilities on how to bring together machine and human capabilities to create organizational value, reflecting different culture, values, and the extraordinary scope for innovation in this domain.

The pandemic is accelerating the uptake of automation in a number of domains, notably where they can reduce human contact and possible contagion. These shifts too will build more diverse organizations.

Even greater divergence in performance

An increasing divergence in performance in organizations has been a feature of the business landscape for many years.

Today there are far more ways in which organizations can fundamentally differ in how they function. This inevitably means organizational performance will increasingly diverge.

One result of this trend is that more companies will fail. Yet those that succeed will likely thrive, even in an adverse economic environment.

Creating unique organizations

More than ever before, building and evolving organizations is an intensely creative and innovative process.

Entirely new organizational forms are not just possible, but will proliferate in coming months and years.

This diversity of organizational forms will enable the creative destruction that characterizes a swiftly changing world, creating a vibrant ecosystem that overall will be far more resilient and able to cope with extraordinary shocks such as the one we are experiencing today.

The more variety in our organizations, the better off we will be. So let us experiment with what is possible.

Recently I wrote 9 insights into the future of air travel in a post-coronavirus world, summarizing my thoughts on the potential pathways to the resumption of international travel.

A nice article last week in Business Insider on what air travel may look like after the pandemic drew on interviews with “a variety of travel experts, travel agents, and one futurist”, to include my thoughts.

Below are my comments that were featured in the article:

Our wanderlust is an intrinsic part of us and can’t be held back indefinitely.

“Humans need to travel. That is a fundamental aspect of what it is to be human,” said Ross Dawson, author and futurist. While he believes the road to “normal” will be a bumpy one, filled with setbacks, he has no doubt we will get there.

It is certainly a safe prediction that not all airlines will survive, given their almost complete lack of revenue and irreducible overheads including cost of capital

Dawson is certain that we’ll see further consolidation in the airline industry. And in a recent Business Insider article, David Slotnick cited an aviation consultancy that suggested this will be the case, writing that “many of the world’s airlines could be bankrupt by May because of the COVID-19 crisis.”

As noted by some of the experts interviewed, domestic travel will reopen first as restrictions on international travel will remain in place for far longer. However we will see very different behaviors.

Dawson thinks it depends on the person.

“We are emotionally scarred, and there’s some people that are gung ho and happy to launch out as soon as they can, and others who will be more cautious and wait not be the first [on planes],” said Dawson.

Just as many companies are realising that allowing staff to sometimes work from home has distinct advantages, they are also discovering that collaboration tools can be substitutes for expensive and time-consuming travel.

Most people we spoke to said that being forced to use video conferencing tools could lead individuals and companies to second-guess business travel, and the necessity of certain trips that they may have previously taken for granted.

““I think that there’s potential that we will see more decisions for a long time being taken that we can use digital connection as substitutes for travel,” Dawson said.

Some of the experts suggested that cleaning of airplanes and facilities will be taken to the next level.

Dawson agrees, saying “people will pay more attention to cleanliness records.” He even predicts the rise of a new kind of plane class, which he somewhat jokingly refers to as an “isolation class.”

Claiming that humans will now be “highly sensitized to the risk of a pandemic,” he foresees airlines having to step up their precautions, whether that’s testing the health of every single person at boarding, providing face masks and sanitizer, or offering various degrees of distance between people, be that with curtains or little rooms as we have seen in some airlines’ first class cabins.

While our propensity to travel as global wealth increased seemed insatiable, that has clearly turned around for the foreseeable future.

Dawson predicts that people will be making different choices when it comes to travel, weighing whether a trip is “sufficiently compelling, in terms of family connection, in terms of just is this a place I just must be, is this is a meeting I have to go to, whatever it is.”

“It is a higher threshold as to whether people will choose to make the trip, than there has been in the past,” he said, anticipating that jetting off for a quick and exotic weekend will become less likely.

The article concluded with a quote from me, always the irrepressible optimist!

“It’ll be very challenging times, but we’ll be coming back to a better future, you know, a brighter future on the other side,” Dawson predicted.

Some companies, in industries ranging from consumer staples to video-conferencing, are struggling to cope with soaring demand

Yet most are being slammed by factors including economic concerns, reduced spending, or simple inability of their customers to come to them.

The immediacy of Survival

Of course every organization must focus on surviving through this extraordinary crisis to get to better times on the other side.

In many cases this means cutting costs, including actively negotiating with landlords or financial institutions, taking full advantage of government subsidies, and reconsidering staffing levels while recognizing the human impact.

Every organization also needs to reconfigure work and workflow for the reality that most people will be (and certainly should be if at all possible) working from home. This requires selecting platforms, establishing protocols, employees learning new systems, and shifting as smoothly as possible to ways of working that for some companies are radically different from their norm.

We will never return to ‘normal’

Some leaders are trying to estimate the timeframe for when business will return to normal and they can resume their company operations as before.

That will never happen. The world will be irrevocably changed by this crisis.

In coming weeks I will share more detailed analysis about the ways in which the social and business landscape is likely to be different in a post-pandemic world.

Certainly, however soon we emerge from coronavirus lockdown, at very least there will be deep-rooted fears seared into populaces of this or other viruses again spreading out of control, not to mention broader structural shifts.

The most critical changes and impacts will vary across industries and organizations, but every company will find themselves doing business in a quite different world than we lived and worked in just a couple of months ago.

The imperative of Reinvention

No organization will be able to return to doing business as before.

This means that leaders must, at the same time as they ensure survival through this dire phase, prepare for a substantially different post-pandemic world.

This needs taking a step back, casting aside any current assumptions on which the business is based, completely re-envisaging what the organization could be and should be in a very different world, and swiftly shifting to the requirements of a different landscape.

Shifting from ‘Innovation’ to ‘Reinvention’

Much of my work for many years, including my work with boards and executive teams, as well as running innovation leadership programs for company directors, has been framed around innovation. In a sense innovation is the present work that stems from looking into the future and developing effective foresight on tomorrow’s social and business landscape.

Yet we all acknowledge that innovation is a pretty tired word, often inducing eye-rolling and buzzword fatigue.

Today, when everything is changing, let’s recognize that the operative word for almost every organization should be reinvention, applying to every aspect of the company.

Creative destruction in a rapidly evolving world

Undoubtedly those organizations that have been best at developing their innovation capabilities are the best able to reinvent themselves wholesale today.

And those organizations unable to innovate to the degree of complete reinvention will not survive for long.

‘Survival of the fittest’ is a very slow process when the environment is changing gradually. It becomes far more pointed and rapid when there is a massive shock. Today, the capability for reinvention will be the distinction between those organizations that survive and those that do not.

The process of Reinvention

I will be sharing far more on the process of reinvention in coming weeks, though I have already described a very high-level virtual strategy process for reinvention in a post-pandemic world.

The process will be different for every organization, but there are three broad steps that are likely to be support organizational reinvention.

As in any future-oriented process, the first step must be to explore the likely or possible nature of a post-pandemic world. Issues could include timelines, national variations, consumer sentiment, shifts from physical to digital interaction, workforce structure, automation, supply chain, availability of capital, and many more. While the issues examined need to be relevant to the organization, reinvention means that companies may need to completely reposition, so they can’t limit themselves to looking at their current industry as it stands. It is impossible to set realistic future plans without having substantively explored the possible nature of the future.

There are of course many unknowables in charting the business environment of next year, or even the second half of this year, so using established futures methodologies that account for uncertainty can be invaluable.

The second step, hopefully already well under way, is envisaging possibilities for reimagining the organization and its success in a different world. There are many useful ways to drive divergent thinking and generate the broadest possible range of strategic options.

The third step is to assess the options and possibilities, given the insights generated into the future landscape and the organization’s current capabilities, and set an action plan for the process of reinvention.

Of course at this point most strategy development needs to be done virtually rather than through traditional meetings and workshops. Fortunately there are excellent tools and processes for virtual strategy development that, well-designed, can often result in better outcomes than the usual approaches.

Every leader today must focus on both Survival and Reinvention

Yes, survival today is the starting point.

Yet if you survive the next few months without changing the very nature of your organization, it will not survive much further.

Every leader must also actively focus on reinventing their organization to prosper in what will undoubtedly be a very different landscape, which will never return to how it was before.

I wrote about how to build customer feedback loops in my book Living Networks, shown below. The advice is still just as relevant today, not least as still so few companies are doing this well.

Building customer feedback loops

Consumer expectations have soared over the last years. In a world of digital connections, customers take for granted virtually immediate responses to their problems and desires. For the last few years companies have been working hard to improve their service response, by creating new service delivery channels, building sophisticated automated response systems, and enhancing call center processes. The intent is to respond to customers’ issues quickly and efficiently.

What companies now need to do is to close the loop. This means using feedback to change how things are done. What customers tell you should result, not just in fixing a problem or trying to keep them happy, but actually in enhancing services, products, and their delivery, and swiftly getting feedback on those changes. This creates a living cycle that builds powerful relationships, and a level of value to customers that can be hard to equal.

Applying customer feedback to improving how business is done is not new. What is new is how communication technologies enable companies to integrate input and feedback so quickly that the customers become deeply involved in the company’s core processes. This tight customer feedback loop is illustrated below.

The heart of the issue is how customer feedback is used. It’s easy today to gather feedback quickly and effectively through Internet focus groups and by monitoring online discussions; but unless that input is applied to make things different, it is wasted. It is only when customers’ feedback results in changes that they can notice that there is a true customer feedback loop rather than simply a response to complaints. There are four key steps in bringing these customer feedback loops to life, and in the process creating true competitive advantage.

1. Monitor customer discussions

Many people who would never have complained to a company are happy to express their thoughts on PlanetFeedback.com, a website where consumers can share their experiences and views. It’s easier and less confrontational than writing a letter or making a telephone call, consumers feel that their voices are heard because at least their peers will read their opinions, and they understand the power of numbers in attracting the attention of corporations. In a typical story on a similar Australian website, aptly named notgoodenough.com, one user found the manufacturer of a faulty heater responded with alacrity when his complaint was posted in a public forum, after getting no answer to letters and e-mails.

The new forms of dialogue that have emerged in the Internet Age present a massive opportunity for companies to gain a deeper insight into their customers’ views and opinions. Chat and discussion forums are the new agoras—public, open spaces in which everyone can hear what others are saying and join in with their own thoughts. The proliferation of these means that far more of the world of customer interaction is visible, but it is harder to monitor everything that is going on. Companies like eWatch, a division of PR Newswire, scan public activity on the Internet and report to their clients on any references to their company and products. However these services are promoted mainly as a means of identifying and dealing with negative messages. For example eWatch also offers services such as getting forum hosts to delete messages, and tracking down anonymous posters. There may be times when these are useful, but monitoring what is being said about the company is far more than a public relations tool. It should be one of the primary inputs into everything the company does, and how it tries to continually improve what it does. Staples.com has a “service improvement” team that uses feedback directly from customers as well as from third-party monitoring sources to enhance the website and service.

Customer communities often provide the best source of direct input, because participants expect the company to be monitoring discussion, and are more likely to make constructive comments. Unfortunately, there are quite a few customer forums that provide customers with a chance to interact, but their comments are either left unread, or are not acted on in any form. This is a big missed opportunity.

2. Get faster, richer feedback… and use it

Procter & Gamble now does almost half of its product tests and focus groups online, allowing it to get feedback on new product trials within a few days rather than months. Every one of the more than 250 brands within the company’s vast empire of consumer products regularly runs focus groups, so the shift results not just in cost savings but also probably more importantly a substantial acceleration in the feedback and product development process. In a similar vein, every day eBay e-mails thousands of customers that have been in touch with the company within the previous 24 hours to invite them to respond to a detailed satisfaction survey. Companies can now swiftly get far more detailed feedback from their customers. The obvious first step is to take advantage of communication technologies to tap that faster, richer feedback. The initial problem is that there is now often far too much information. In addition, business processes must change in order to take advantage of the new wealth of feedback.

Clearly one of the richest channels for customer feedback is a company’s salesforce. The challenge is taking the immense wealth of information potentially available and making it useful and actionable, without disturbing salespeople from their primary duties. Companies can get their salespeople to contribute ideas or snippets of information into an online system. This is only worthwhile if a streamlined filtering mechanism is in place to ensure action is taken, however this also means that salespeople can be rewarded for valuable contributions. Innovation processes such as the BT Ideas systems referred to in Chapter 5 can be adapted to tap customer feedback. One company provides a different topic each week for its salespeople to focus on in gathering customer feedback.

In technology product development, traditionally alpha testing is an early stage process performed inside the company, while beta testing gathers feedback on a pre-release version from potential customers. It is now possible to rapidly get input from a very broad range of external beta testers, but doing this effectively is becoming an enormous job. BetaSphere, a company that provides software and services to incorporate customer input into product development, has attracted clients such as Palm, Cisco, HP, and Federal Express. These companies need to recruit a broad and representative range of testers; work with them to ensure they are providing useful, timely information; and collate their input into reports that developers can apply directly in enhancing products. Taking full advantage of the new possibilities of information flows requires applying effective processes. In addition to making beta testing far more valuable, the development of the networks means that even very early stage alpha testing can include customers. This is exactly what IBM’s alphaWorks unit does, as described in Chapter 5. Customer involvement can shift from product development to innovation—generating the ideas that drive a business.

3. Involve customers in innovation

United Parcel Service (UPS) regularly visits its largest clients, sending teams that include product development, strategy, and innovation executives, as well as the account manager, to meet its clients’ senior management for up to a day, presenting and discussing forthcoming UPS initiatives. Everything from recently launched products through to very early stage concepts are brought to the table to see what may strike a chord with the clients. In one of these sessions with Gateway, UPS proposed the idea of merging goods in transit. This meant that UPS would put together the shipments from all of Gateway’s suppliers as they were being transported, to result in regular deliveries of all the required goods for production, rather than a multitude of uncoordinated parcels coming into the dock. Gateway expressed enthusiasm at the idea, worked with UPS to refine the concept and implementation, and was the first to adopt this new service that was subsequently offered across all of UPS’s major clients.

Customers always have and always will be the greatest source of innovation. That doesn’t mean that companies can simply ask their customers what they want, and give it to them. Innovation stems from the interaction between a company and its customers, bringing different perspectives together both to come up with novel ideas, and develop them into a useful form. The challenge for companies today is to find effective ways of involving their customers in the innovation process, rather than simply seeking feedback or market testing along the way. The potential power of this is unleashed in a networked world. British consultancy KSBR works with major firms such as Lloyds TSB to identify customers who have complained vocally. It asks these customers to develop ideas to help the companies improve their service, and gets them to present their ideas to company executives in highly interactive forums or on video. KSBR finds that most customers who complain have very constructive ideas, and actively want to help companies to perform better.

Lucas Arts asked its customers to help develop its game “Star Wars Galaxies”. A year before the planned release date, the developers launched a website specifically to get broad participation in the design process. As the game was developed, updates were posted to the site, participants were asked their opinions on design issues, and the lead designers answered questions from the community. Die-hard fans were able to debate issues dear to their heart, such as whether any player should have the ability to achieve the ultimate Star Wars gaming ambition—to become a Jedi Knight. Clearly the exercise was valuable for its promotional value, but as importantly, it resulted in an award-winning, top-quality game that was truly designed from the perspective of the user.

In Chapter 5 you saw how open source software demonstrates the power of customer innovation, as well as the distinction between idea generation and development. This helps frame how you can involve your customers in innovation. Focus on getting ideas directly from customers, as well as gaining insights that will spark your own ideas. Actively engage in dialogues about their needs and issues. Get designers and product developers, not just marketers, to interact directly with customers. And design development processes that involve customers throughout. Customer testing is not enough—you have to get them involved earlier. That is what creates winning products and services.

4. Use input for customization

The product designers who spend a day at GE Plastics’ Customer Innovation Center in Selkirk, New York, can leave the premises not only having developed the exact color and effects they require for a new product, but toting home in their luggage an initial batch of color resin and sample plastic parts in their very own custom color. If the library of 20,000 standard colors isn’t sufficient, customers can create a new one, within a few minutes produce plastic samples to view under a range of lighting conditions, and then if they have brought plastic molds, can evaluate how their own product looks in the selected color. For those who prefer to avoid leaving the office, an online service allows a similar interactive process for color development, producing small lots of the customer-designed color within 48 hours. The customer colors are held in the system, and an extranet gives customers a secure way to share color information with third-party designers and manufacturers.

Billions are spent annually doing customer surveys, yet many of these focus mainly on asking customers how satisfied they are with different aspects of service. This feedback certainly can be useful, but far more valuable is applying information directly to customizing service and products. Consider how you can build this approach into your business model, as GE Plastics has done.

Many companies have missed much of the potential value in how they have implemented customer relationship management (CRM) systems. These systems can only ever be as valuable as the information they contain. As firms gather information on all of their interactions with customers, they can learn a great deal on how to service them better, and what sorts of offers they are likely to accept. However, whether you interact with your customers online, through call centers, or through dedicated salespeople, you have an opportunity to ask them questions. So given your customers’ limited attention span, what few questions do you want to ask them?

Rather than asking your customers whether they are satisfied with your service, try asking questions that will enable you to customize what you do for them. In Chapter 4 you saw how this kind of approach can be applied in high-value services relationships, but it is just as relevant in every industry. Depending on your business, you might ask what communication channels they prefer, whether they prefer a large typeface, what operating system they use, or the configuration of their loading docks. Customers recognize that this sort of information enables you to provide them with better service, so they are usually very open. The trick is designing your CRM system so that it can both accept this sort of information, and apply it directly to customized service. If the system is designed with this in mind, then it can prompt customers or relationship staff for the information, and then immediately demonstrate to customers that you are listening to them, by using it to directly enhance service. This can do an immense amount in making them more open to sharing information with you, creating loyalty, building rich customer feedback loops, and uncovering far more revenue-generating opportunities.

Customer feedback loops link the people inside an organization with the most important people outside: the customers. However in order to be able to respond effectively and create the service levels and innovation that will delight customers, the workers in a company themselves need to be closely networked. Let us examine the flow of knowledge and work within organizations.

In it explain in brief my Vectors of Disruption framework and explain how automation and platforms are the primary aggregated forces disrupting business, society and government.

Below is a transcript of the video.

If we look at, what I term the vectors of disruption, there’s a whole array of underlying technologies – many of the buzz phrases – but essentially there’s two key domains of disruption.

One is platforms, and these include marketplaces which are creating peer-to-peer markets. It also includes blockchain and other platforms on which people are building systems and exchanges and new ways of doing business.

The other key domain is that of automation, where artificial intelligence is changing the nature of work, it is automating vehicles, it is automating logistics, it is automating entire aspects of what are businesses today.

Together platforms and automation are disrupting businesses, business models, organisational structure, societal structure, the nature of education.

These are the things which all executives need to understand and be incorporating into their strategies.

IEEE is an august institution with over 400,000 members and an enormous impact on the technology industry globally, publishing over 170 top-rated journals, running 1800 conferences a year, and managing over 1000 standards, including WiFi.

All associations globally have been impacted by technological, social and structural shifts. IEEE’s board is on the front foot in understanding and addressing these issues, inviting me to speak on these changes and the emerging opportunities to help frame the discussions over their two-day strategic retreat.

A video of the full keynote has kindly been provided by IEEE.tv here.


I will share more on this later, including possibly a transcript and other comments.

The group was the first to get a run-through of my new concept framework Vectors of Disruption, shown below, which I used to introduce and frame the rest of my presentation.

Click on the image for the full-size pdf

Some brief thoughts on the framework:

The first comment is that I – as many others – am not a fan of the word ‘disruption’, which has lost much of its meaning through misuse and overuse in recent years. However I cannot find a better word for what is meant here. I’m very open to other suggestions!

Overall the intent of the framework is to distinguish between the different layers that are driving disruption, from the underlying forces, through the high-impact developments and finally key structural shifts. These are often confused, making the mechanisms – or vectors – of disruption far harder to understand.

The framework is of course immensely simplified. There are many other elements that could have been included, such as demographics, however many of these will play out over a longer period.

Underlying Forces

The most common focus is on Information technologies, with past future exponential growth in Data, Processing, and Connectivity, which a long runway yet for these trends. Advancing Interface technologies are also critical in giving people far deeper engagement to information.

Technologies in other domains, including Materials, Health and Energy are also impacting not just these industries, but many others, including construction, infrastructure, manufacturing and transport.

Expectations are continuing to rise on every front. Societal expectations, notably of sustainability and accountability, seem to be shifting into higher gears. Customers are demanding powerful experiences and customization. Another important force is that of shifting Investor expectations, who not only expect consistent growth, but also scalability and constant renewal.

High-impact developments

Here we can catalog the array of technology buzzwords that soak through almost every business presentation you are likely to see this year, such as AI, Robotics, Big Data and VR. While these developments are hyped, they individually are likely to have a massive impact on business and society, and even more when they are combined. However there are also important non-technological developments, including Power to the individual and active Capital reallocation by investors.

Structural shifts

While it is bold to point to only two fundamental structural shifts in the economy, I believe they will be responsible for the majority of structural change in coming years.
Automation in manufacturing has already significantly played out, however we are really just at the beginning of the impact of automation – as the application of AI and robotics in a work context – on not just almost all job roles, but how organizations function.
Platforms are the fundamental mechanism underlying the network economy. Beyond the evident rise of marketplaces in transport, accommodation, work, and many other domains, platforms also encompass blockchain and crypto-currencies, open innovation structures, and new models of reintermediation.

Disruption

It is clear that these forces, developments and shifts mean that existing Business models are unlikely to be sustainable without changes, sometimes evolutionary, sometimes revolutionary. However we also need to focus on other domains of disruption, including Organizational structures, Urban structure, Education and the Role of Government. Perhaps most importantly there is potentially massive disruption to existing Social structures. Understanding and shaping this in positive directions – to the degree possible – is everyone’s responsibility.

Of course this framework only looks at the vectors and structure of disruption, not the responses or solutions. I will be creating other frameworks soon that focus on what we need to do to create successful outcomes in a disrupted world.

As always this framework is released as a Beta v1, not intended to be final, but a first attempt that will be refined over time if useful. So please let me know your comments, ideas, and constructive criticism so that can be incorporate into subsequent versions.

The two short videos below were excerpted from the interview, with summary notes below.

Some of the points I make:

* The future of the economy is more and more with small and fast-growth businesses, who will take a larger share of the economy

* Large corporations will still exist, but will be leaner and smaller

* As the world is moving faster, we need more agile organisations; corporates are finding that harder and are sourcing much of their innovation by acquiring smaller more nimble companies

* Everyone needs to be learning all the time – learning should be framed a joy and opportunity

* However no-one can know everything, we shouldn’t put ourselves under pressure to do so, but we can be open to look for ideas and knowledge where we can find it

* Crowdsourcing levels the playing field – every business has ready access to useful, relevant talent

* Building a flexible workforce requires combining those at the core who understand the organisation’s values and culture, with those outside who can do specific tasks

Image: Kenny Louie