Coverage in over 100 major publications from more than 30 countries helped to garner many, many millions of views, attract critics galore, and generate substantial debate.

While I don’t believe in predictions because they will almost always be wrong, I made an exception in this case, in order to provoke news industry executives and to stimulate useful strategic action to respond to a changing industry landscape.

The first date on the timeline – US in 2017 – is now demonstrably wrong (though possibly not vastly – we will see).

I have written an extensive review of the timeline, its original intent, and where the predictions stand now: Review of the Newspaper Extinction Timeline: what we got wrong and the future of news from here.

Please do read the review if you have any interest at all in the future of news or in futures thinking.

The timeline was widely mis-interpreted as an attack on the news industry. While I understand that it would be viewed as negative, for me the most important issue was never whether we continued to have news-on-paper, but rather how we could create a positive future for news.

Hanging on too long to a dying medium instead of focusing on growing channels was most likely to jeopardize the future of any news organization, as has been proven to be the case.

Almost all my futures work for client organizations is fundamentally about creating the future. The future does not happen, it is created. By far the best reason to engage in futures thinking is to understand what you need to do to shape the future positively.

I also believe that the future of news and the news industry will be at the heart of how we create a positive future for humanity. Unless we are well-informed we will not be able to build a positive future, individually or collectively.

That is why I have launched a new publication, Creating the Future of News. Its intent is to support a positive future for the news industry, by providing analysis, data, and a forum for constructive conversations and sharing.

The publication is still in Beta, but already has substantial data and other resources.

Please visit the site, join the community, and get involved.

Predictions are not valuable unless they inspire useful action. Rather than simply look at the future, we need to work to create the future. And the best way to do that is to help the right ideas, people and resources to connect.

I hope Creating the Future of News supports that in some way large or small. Being right or wrong doesn’t matter. Contributing in whatever way possible to creating a better future does.

Image: Paul Reynolds

Below is an excerpt from the report giving a snapshot of some of the shifts needed in education:

Education of the Future

Looking further into the future of education, we may see a radical restructuring of how we learn, not just in schools and universities, but through our entire life. Classrooms will continue to exist, enhanced through the use of a wide range of new tools, technologies and methodologies. Education will also become an ongoing part of everyone’s lives, and embedded into our employment, helping us improve our skills and capabilities while we work.

Characteristics

Pervasive accessibility
Learning will be always available to everyone at all times, at work, home and everywhere spend time

Personalised journeys
Everyone learns differently. Algorithms will uncover our preferences so all learning is designed for the individual.

Real world relevance
Education will prepare us for the real world by focusing on understanding how knowledge will be applied and the emotional and relationship skills required

Immersive experience
Virtual reality and other tools will allow us to experience lifelike situations and practice in simulations before we need to apply our skills in real life

Augmented teachers
Teachers will remain central to education, but they will be augmented by technology to draw on the best tools available

Peer learning
Education will shift to learning from experts to learning with people who are like you, learning together as the world changes

Credentials

Formal degrees and diplomas will continue to be important in the future, however will be less necessary. Algorithms are increasingly able to analyse data about your work and study to indicate your capabilities in a work environment, often better than a formal academic qualification can.

Some employers are identifying high-potential candidates with software that assesses how specialists in a field have contributed to their profession and how their peers view them.

Rather than multi-year degrees, we will often get recognition for shorter learning journeys. Massively Online Open Courses (MOOCs) are offering ‘nano-degrees’ that show competence in a specific domain.

We may move to a world in which employers look more to the information they can gather about individuals’ knowledge, work and attitudes than to their official certificates.

I spent some time giving the partners current perspectives on both disruption and innovation in professional services, with the rest of the time spent facilitating the group in generating and prioritizing initiatives to drive the members firms’ future.

I ran through the domains in which they can enhance their business models and performance. However in professional services probably the most important domain is service delivery, in which extraordinary possibilities for innovation have opened up in the network economy.

I have just recalled that eight years ago I co-authored a white paper for SAP titled Service Delivery Innovation: Creating Client Value and Enhancing Profitability. While it is not recent, the issues I covered are still completely relevant today, so I thought I’d share a section from the white paper here:

Characteristics of Successful Service Delivery Innovation

Professional services firms that excel at service delivery innovation demonstrate six key characteristics:
• A networked organization
• Flexible workflows
• Global sourcing
• Client and supplier collaboration
• Continuous innovation
• Enabling technology

A Networked Organization

Professional services organizations are ultimately collections of people: deeply specialized professionals who bring together their expertise to create value for clients. As such, the relationships and networks that link individual professionals are at the heart of the organization. Siloed professional organizations are ineffective. Successful organizational networks rely on human capital policies and technologies that quickly and effectively locate expertise, support project teams, and encourage collaboration throughout the organization.

Flexible Workflows

Streamlined and effective workflows are a vital component of service delivery innovation within a professional services firm. However, this workflow is markedly different from the workflow required by a routine operation, such as processing an invoice for payment. Workflows within innovative professional services firms need to be readily reconfigured to adapt to different projects, situations, and emerging market needs. Workflows need to support the firm’s efforts to identify talent, create marketplaces, establish pricing mechanisms, enhance client relationships, and integrate quality assurance processes into workflows. The systems and processes in place should support the introduction of new services and products across the organization.

Global Sourcing

Both internal and external sourcing strategies are critical to the success of a global professional services firm, and work and resources need to flow across boundaries. To succeed at global sourcing, professional services firms must undertake several initiatives. First, they must consistently implement highly effective processes for identifying and applying internal talent. Secondly, firms must establish an approach for drawing on external talent as soon as required. Professional services firms must master this complex activity in order to compete in a global market influenced by low-cost labor and emerging pools of expertise. Firms need integrated workflow technologies, available collaboration spaces, appropriate organizational design, and a professional culture that supports work across borders. Firms must also adapt and mesh the work and social attitudes of its home country with the very different cultures of colleagues and clients on other continents.

Client and Supplier Collaboration

If a firm provides “black box” services – characteristic of no collaboration with clients – it will rapidly become a commoditized service provider. Professional services firms need to effectively and continuously collaborate with their clients to build greater value and lock in clients for the long term. Firms must also achieve outstanding collaboration with their talent suppliers. In a modularized economy, receiving the greatest value from external talent requires bringing them into the firm’s processes rather than contracting for work piecemeal. To enable external collaboration, professional services firms can use technology that allows remote professionals to view and participate in key business processes.

Continuous Innovation

Service delivery innovation is an ongoing process; it must be embedded into the way a professional services firm functions and develops new products and services. Some initiatives – such as implementing global processes, developing client collaboration, or creating a more networked organization – are ongoing as well. There is always room for improvement. Other strategies, such as productizing services, may evolve in stages, building on existing capabilities and firm maturity. Most importantly, everyone in the company, from the executive team on down, must continually seek better ways to deliver services.

Enabling Technology

Technology is a key enabler of service delivery innovation – as shown by the overwhelming response of 93% of the professional services firms surveyed. Each of the characteristics of service delivery innovation discussed so far requires a technology platform that is modular, flexible, and reconfigurable. In addition, this platform must integrate easily with external systems and processes to support client and supplier collaboration and to draw on global best-of-breed resources.

You can read the full white paper here.

As part of the workshop we used a framework that I originally developed over a decade ago in the context of collaboration in the financial services industry, but I have used in the last year in industries as diverse as healthcare, airlines, and professional services.

The future of every industry lies in value creation across organizations. To achieve that we need explicit discussions and engagements among all industry participants on what it is that they’d like to collectively achieve, and how they can get there. This framework lays out the key components:

Click on the image for a larger version

You have to start with:

Vision

This comes from discovering and finding alignment between participants:
What world do we want to create? What might be possible?

From there you delve into the required:

Foundations

This is where you examine:
What institutions, business models, platforms and systems will enable this vision? What is missing now?

You also need to understand the:

Roadblocks

There are always obstacles; you need to understand and explore:
What is blocking the potential? How can we take away or bypass these blocks?

To get to your vision you need to explore the many possible:

Paths

Having a successful journey to your destination means you must ask:
What possible paths forward could allow us to reach our vision? What is most feasible? What are milestones along the way?

This will inevitably require a high degree of:

Collaboration

In order to build this you first must understand:
What collaboration is needed between whom? How can we foster and enable that collaboration?

And finally you will never achieve the vision without clear and consistent:

Action

Collectively you need to define and agree:
What action today can be taken by the industry? What action can you take to enable the industry’s potential?

This framework, or variations on it, can be applied in any industry. Every industry requires leadership to change from where it has been to where it can create substantially greater economic value for its participants, and social value for all stakeholders.

Some may wonder why they should invest their energy in leading their industry forward rather than focusing solely on their organization, however leading beyond boundaries always brings value to those who help move the system forward.

As I wrote in Living Networks:

Today, you must be a leader across a domain that often extends far beyond the borders of your company. In order for your company to succeed, the whole value network within which you work must succeed as well. Unless you provide the leadership for that to happen, you become the subject of industry forces rather than creating them. Industries will inevitably shift dramatically as the network economy comes to life, and those that will take best advantage of those changes are those that lead them.

In every industry, the opportunity is there.

City of Melbourne’s over-arching vision for the annual Melbourne Spring Fashion Week is to position Melbourne as Australia’s premier fashion destination, and have a real economic impact by driving increased sales for retailers in the city.

In partnering with IBM for the second year the intention was to extend the impact of the event beyond the week and to drive ticket sales and in turn sales by tapping the social currency of influencers.

Melbourne Spring Fashion Week is unusual in fashion shows in that everything on the runways can be bought at stores in the city. This contrasts to the traditional role of fashion shows as breaking new fashion, which may not be available for many months after it is launched.

Melbourne Spring Fashion Week used IBM Social Media Analytics on Twitter and Instagram to uncover the top 50 relevant fashion influencers, used Watson Personality Insights to work out how best to approach them, and invited them to be MSFW “insiders”, asking them what content would be most useful to them.

Ticket sales have been considerably higher than last year, with 4 of the events sold out.

The initiative is particularly interesting in showing how social analytics and engagement can help drive shoppers into shopping centers and physical stores.

While individual stores can do a great deal to merge their digital, social and physical engagement, the real power comes in bringing people to a shopping center or area, or even an entire city center.

All shopping is becoming social. Retail strategies for merging physical and digital are best envisaged and implemented on a large scale, tapping collaboration and activating buyers.

Image credit: Eva Rinaldi

The CITIE Framework examines 9 different areas in which cities can support entrepreneurship and innovation, shown here:


Source: City Initiatives for Technology, Innovation and Entrepreneurship report

Each of these factors can be mapped on their importance to entrepreneurs, but also on the ability of cities to influence them. The report doesn’t look at the factors for which cities can have little short-term impact, such as house prices and quality of life, and focuses on the domains where they can implement initiatives that will have a real impact, such as access to customers, cost and availability of workspaces, and networking opportunities.

The report goes on to look at the 9 factors in detail, including ranking the relative success of each of the 40 cities covered in the study, and then goes on to provide a summary ranking of the position of each of the cities in driving innovation.

There is much that city governments can do to drive innovation; this report provides an excellent framework and analysis to support those initiatives.

You can view a video of the segment by clicking on the image below.

We primarily discussed the fantastic Wikihouse project, which provides Creative Commons plans for parts which can be 3D printed or machine cut and readily assembled to build inexpensive homes.

The genesis of Wikihouse was in addressing housing affordability in the UK, however it is now a global movement, enabling both individuals and communities to inexpensively build homes.

Open source concepts are at the heart of the project, freely providing plans with a license that means that improvements must be shared back with the community.

Yet this approach for house-building is only enabled by 3D printing and machine cutting, allowing digital plans to be easily made into the components from which the buildings can be constructed.

Open source evolved from the world of software and has now been applied across many other domains including physical objects.

3D printing has until recently been limited to fairly small-scale objects, however this is being rapidly scaled up.

Given the broader scope of these technologies, housing seems like an obvious application, and Wikihouse a fantastic initiative in this space.

Where else can open source plans and 3D printing be applied to bring value to communities?

It is just over 15 years ago now that my first book was released with the subtitle The Future of Professional Services (now out in its Second edition). While these days my work covers a far broader scope, over the years I have worked extensively with professional services firms to help them create successful futures.

There has been substantial change in the professions over the last decade, however there will unquestionably be far greater change in the years to come.

It was an absolutely fascinating day at the conference exploring the future of professional services. I will be sharing more from the conference over time, but today would just like to put down a few initial thoughts from the three themes of the day.

Changing Clients

One of the biggest challenges to professional firms is how clients are changing. In my not-so-recent white paper The 7 MegaTrends of Professional Services, the first MegaTrend I named was Client Sophistication, and since that was written this trend has gone a lot further.

At yesterday’s conference, two executives together responsible for purchasing over $1 billion in professional services showed how far the bar has gone up recently.

One company is consistently increasing its in-house capabilities, through staff acquisition, improved processes, and the introduction of task automation, virtually all at the expense of the use of external providers.

Another major company, while it recognizes the importance of relationships in professional services buying, is doing more work internally as well as finding ways of tapping the network of its staff to find the best professional providers.

Unquestionably client organizations are rapidly changing, developing their capabilities, and are increasingly capable of selecting and working with the best specialist firms in highly collaborative relationships, moving far beyond the “one-stop-shop” mentality.

Digital Disruption

There are three major domains in which digital technologies are disrupting professional services.

Connected work and crowdsourcing. Work can be done anywhere, leading to the globalisation of both clients and service delivery. More importantly, connectivity is allowing crowdsourcing of professional services, including expert marketplaces such as SkillSapien and Expert360, and expert aggregation services such as Kaggle, 10EQS and Wikistrat.

Process automation. Many tasks that have traditional been done by people, notably context-relevant document generation, can be readily automated.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning. The emerging generation of artificial intelligence is being applied to highly complex tasks and decisions, in domains including medicine, law, and consulting.

Business Model Innovation

It is clear that traditional professional services business models are being challenged on many fronts. Three of the high-level issues that need to addressed are:

Business model transition. There are a wide variety of fundamental factors that firms can consider changing, including pricing structures, workforce models, ownership structure, and market positioning. Legacy models are often poorly suited to an evolving marketplace, and important strategic decisions need to be made about which levers should be changed and how to do this.

Positive feedback loops.
A sound business model needs to have built in to it mechanisms that reinforce the foundations for future success. I described one of these feedback loops as the heart of professional services, in linking great people and great client work. Every firm is either in a positive or negative cycle on this critical front. New business models also need to be designed to have positive feedback loops at the center.

Business model portfolios.
Professional services firms almost always have not just one business model, but multiple business models. Professional firm leaders need to recognize the diversity of business models, and make clear choices about which current business models should be maintained in a changing business environment, but also which potential new business models will strengthen with change, and be complementary to existing business models.

Over the next while I will share more insights on how professional services leaders can shape a successful future in a rapidly changing world, drawing on my own work, that of my colleague George Beaton and his team at Beaton Research + Consulting, and the insights developed by the participants at yesterday’s conference.

An article in CIO magazine titled Humans versus machines: Who will be employed in future? reviewed some of the highlights of Dawson’s speech. After the article’s opening it quotes:

“Robots and artificial intelligence are getting better and better over time. So we have robot vacuum cleaners, we have robot dish washers… [robots] being able to fold the laundry. Now this happens to be quite expensive machines… but we can have household robots do these kinds of tasks,” said Dawson.

“Drivers are being challenged. Drivers may not exist. Mercedes just announced they have a semi-trailer, a big truck, which is going to drive around without a driver driving it.”

More knowledge tasks are also being handed over to machines, he said. He used the example of IBM’s Watson supercomputer assisting doctors by looking through hundreds of thousands of documents and data to come up with a suggested diagnosis to complex diseases such as cancer.

We absolutely need to recognize how machines can take over some existing jobs, but a more powerful frame is seeing how humans and machines can best work together.

However, it doesn’t have to be a situation where it’s humans versus machines and there are fewer jobs for people, Dawson said. Jobs for humans are not necessarily reducing, just changing, and it’s more about working together with machines to increase humans’ capabilities, he said.

A computer first managed to beat a chess grandmaster in 1997, he said. “That’s a long time ago and computers have come a long way since then; yet, the best computers at chess can still be beaten by humans and computers working together. The best chess in the world is played by humans and computers working together,” the futurist said.

“Again, doctors together with technology can be better [themselves] — with the robots, the artificial intelligence.”

The key issue is ongoing skill development, driven by individuals and supported by institutions.

“Back in the ’70s and ’80s, when you did a degree you were able to live off the fruits of your labours for quite some time. Today, when you get a degree, it is already out of date. So what does have value is deep, world-class expertise. You can’t just be the best in your domain locally; you must be at the right level globally,” Dawson said.

“Humans are good at relationships; machines… are not nearly as good. We [humans] can collaborate and work together. So this is where deep expertise is — that we must work with other people, collaborate with other people.

“[The] third piece, which is distinctively human and keeps us miles ahead of the machines, is creativity. The ability to do magic, pull together things that we read or things we dreamed or conversations we’ve had into something that is new.”

We need to choose our domains of expertise, and use peer and community learning to stay on top of our domains. In a fast-changing world the most effective learning is collaborative.

“Clearly you can’t be a world class expert in 20 domains, but you can say there are two complementary domains. Deakin University recently released a master’s in business and data analytics. These two complementary skill sets is where we can create value.”

With technology constantly evolving at a more rapid pace, informal learning will continue to be key in future, Dawson said. He used the example of TopCoder, where coders compete not only for prizes but to learn from others how and why a project succeeded or failed, and improve their own skills and processes.

“If you want to be a world class expert, the only and the real way to do it is find those who are the experts, follow them on their social media, engage and have conversations in that community.”

We need to accentuate and make the most of our humanity. The power that technology gives us means that we must choose wisely how we use that extraordinary power.

Even though machines can be stronger, faster and smarter than humans, they don’t automatically come with humanity, Dawson pointed out. The high-level ethical decisions that humans make means that we can’t simply hand over all power to the machines to run our jobs.

“We have the power to create ourselves; we can change our genetics. We can literally change who we are as humans, let alone the impact on the nature of work and the shape of the planet. This is something where you all must be ethicists, who are making ethical choices.”

Read the full article for more insights.

However much of the big data discussion is about how to market better to customers, gathering data ABOUT them so companies can sell more to them.

This seems to me to be the wrong way to think about it. Big data should be used to CREATE VALUE FOR CUSTOMERS. From that good things will flow to everyone, including of course attracting the most customers.

In the mid-1990s I became involved in knowledge management. I thought the ideas were immensely valuable, but I could see absolutely no consideration of the customer. So I wrote my first book, Developing Knowledge-Based Client Relationships, to frame knowledge as primarily about creating value WITH the customer.

Today it is back to the same story. In big data there are fantastic tools and capabilities, that are being applied to selling to rather than creating value for the customer.

In a number of my recent executive briefings for clients the financial services sector I’ve used the example of Simple, the startup online bank recently acquired by BBVA for US$117 million. It uses rich customer data to provide insights for the customer on their financial situation, including “Safe-to-Spend” recommendations.

Another example from the financial sector is driver feedback apps. Insurance companies such as State Farm in the US and Ingenie in the UK provide mobile phone apps that use the accelerometers and other sensors in phones to provide detailed analysis and recommendations on driving style. This is of course useful not only to drivers, but to the parents of newly-minted drivers. The data is valuable to the company, but the way it can be captured is to provide this in a useful format to customers.

Across all industry sectors the first question in thinking about big data should be: “How can we use data to create value FOR our customers?”

Answering that will drive competitive differentation and value for everyone.