Value in the gap between real relationships and the Uncanny Valley

The rise of Customer Data Platforms and the demise of simple CRM is plotting a course toward the CX-centred One Office - a re-platformed enterprise designed to predict and align supply to demand through orchestrated and automated systems of experience, productivity, trust and intelligence.

They are a response to the increasingly fractured and distanced relationship that brands have with their customers. Customer expectations have been on the rise since the possibility of personalisation online started to emerge after an era of one-size-fits-all mass media marketing. We now bathe in the warm glow of being 'remembered' by the airline crew or hotel staff. We like that companies keep track of our previous purchases and other items we browsed - for our convenience.

We yearn for the kind of customer intimacy the marketplace once delivered to us through face-to-face transactions at the same store, in the same town, week after week. We loved that they anticipated our need - the deli starting to prepare our order the moment they spotted us in the queue, for example.

1-2-1 relationships were easy in the real world. They just weren't scalable.

It is in the gap between real relationships and an uncanny valley of intimacy extrapolated from data, that the new platforms compete.

Customer Data Platforms - such as Adobe's Real Time CDP, Salesforce's Customer 360 Audiences, Amazon's Amperty and MS Dynamics CDP bring together data from as many digital touch points as their users are able to identify - and instrument - to provide a '360 degree' view of the customer. 

They can be managed directly by the marketers best positioned to use the outputs and - through smart orchestration - cut out the need to access, manage and reconfigure multiple systems to create customer profiles, plan and test marketing campaigns, design strategies and predict behaviour. They meet the increasing focus on Life Time Value among marketeers to counter the ever-rising Cost Per Acquisition they face amid tough competition in Search.

The intent is to optimise CX down to the segment of 1 - in real time. The intent is to sell more stuff to people.

It's a rapidly growing market with over 100 vendors already in the space and in which a series of high-profile acquisitions have seen the likes of SessionM acquired by Mastercard, Treasure Data by ARM and Allsight captured by Informatica.

For enterprises late to digital, they offer a fast track to catch up and even over take rivals in digital marketing.

But for all the trumpeting of the application of AI, built-in controls on privacy and security of data, their successful application remains both data and human dependent. They are no panacea for limited data sources, or for creating appropriate customer-centred strategy or tactics in response to insights gleaned.

The best are able to play the roles of both systems of insight and systems of engagement - not only achieving a view of the customer, but deploying the next best action to engage that customer.

But the journey need not, and should not, stop there. 

The winners will be those that see their future in becoming seamlessly integrated with systems of productivity - that understand that their role is in the journey to a CX-centred One Office enterprise in which front-middle and back office are one. (One Office is a vision for 2025 laid out by HFS Research).

This identifies an opportunity for CDPs: To provide insight for business decision making not just in marketing and sales, but across the product, service and experience design lifecycle.

CDPs have a role to play in making products which are best fit with deeply understood customer need. Close that gap and the CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) collapses - with satisfied customers readily taking on the role of enthusiastic peer-to-peer marketers.

Engaging qualitative CX data - at the level of anthropological and ethnographic research - offers a way to address the 'Why' questions that quantitative data misses - reducing the breadth and cost of A/B testing - and time to market. Known as Thick Data, this insight into the emotional lives of consumers goes beyond that available in big data. It can explain why consumers choose what they do, the reasons behind their behaviour, and offer guidance on why some trends stick when others do not.

The extension into value innovation (iterating products and services with the focus on end user need) places customer need at the heart of the organisation. When amplified within a One Office environment the enterprise is equipped with the dynamic and connected processes and capabilities to recognise new contexts, gather insight into human needs emerging in those new contexts, and produce responses at pace towards those emerging needs.

The best businesses have always known their customers well and responded fastest to their changing needs.

CDPs can do so much more than simply understand and respond to current needs with marketing. They can be the cornerstone in anticipating new needs and producing best-fit responses as they emerge.

Photo by Alex Knight on Unsplash

We Are All Companies Now - a narrative for the 2020s

2021 marks 15 years of looking into the future for this blog. The intent was always to look further ahead in order to go faster - drawing from my motorcycle training. The further ahead you look on the road, the earlier you see the twists and turns - the direction of travel - and the greater your ability to spot and avoid emerging risks.

To that end, and with a new decade dawning (there was never a year zero, so they always start with a 1), I want to map out the road ahead as I see it and consider a narrative for the journey ahead.

For me its important to focus on the Human Experience Trends - the ones that change the context in which we experience our lives. The consequences of these are new needs. And it is in serving those new needs that future prosperity lies.

My list is:

1. Sustainability

2. Decentralisation

3. Personalisation

4. Low Code/No Code

5. Automation

6. Wellness

7. Small pieces

8. Platform

9. Start-up

The most successful responses will be those which respond where multiple trends converge. For example a Sustainable, Decentralised, Personalised response focusing on Wellness and applying Automation to deliver an ever-improving experience.

A proxy for predicting the success of your future plans could therefore be in the number of trends ticked off. But trends do not a value product make. Instead, trends direct you to where to look for the consequent future experiences from which need emerges.

So you will need to understand the impact of these trends on the human experience. Faster Future Consulting's #ResponsiveOrganisation framework can help here. Other frameworks are, of course,  available. 

But first, let's put some meat on the bones. Let's explore potential consequent contexts.

1. Sustainability. Top of my personal list and, increasingly high on the list of those who can afford for it to be. For me sustainability is all about creating a safe and just space for humanity (from Doughnut Economics). I have a framework in #planetexperience which seeks to place the planet on the same pedestal that successful businesses have placed their customer in the last 20 years. We can imagine a very near future in which planet benefits (just as customer benefits are) are understood and designed to be net in every new product, service and experience design. Those companies leading the way in this will gain the same kind of competitive advantage as the big winners of the last 20 years have through their customer obsession. Planet obsession is not a replacement for customer obsession. It is an ally and equal.

2. Decentralisation. The trend has been accelerating since the web started usurping production lines as the primary means of value production. It has only been accelerated by Covid-19. The future of decentralisation was already here, it has simply been distributed more evenly in the last year to include where we work. The trend is further disrupting computing; with 5G, the demands of AI and the easy availability of Internet Of Things devices driving a demand for Edge Computing. The nodes on the network are becoming increasingly self-sufficient, being enabled with both the capabilities and capacities to do what only centralised functions could achieve before. The media industry was first to feel this punch (we are all publishers now). Is there a corollary of this in the future of work (we are all companies now)? This particular new context, converged with automation and start-up open a world of new needs for solutions that democratise building a business - across all functions from raising finance to developing the tech.

3. Personalisation. One size fits all was a mass production solution for a mass production age. The widespread application of AI enables a new accelerant to the personalisation trend. Not only can we personalise how we sell to individuals, now we can enable last-yard personalisation of physical products; enabling customers to remix and remodel to meet their own needs in the home. Combine 3D printing to deliver the home factory (as we discussed on FasterFuture back in 2010). There is a current trend I'd call the 'SodaStreamisation' of home personalisation - in which businesses are creating in-home machines for you to create and personalise at home. Think Nespresso and next-generation versions such as L'oreal's Perso. Looking further ahead there is a market for the home factory platform - the future generations of 3D printing. Edge Computing will drive increased capabilities in these devices. The desire to gather personal data in order to better serve your needs may extend to new models of freemium. For example, take our fridge for free, in exchange for the data it generates about your purchasing habits and lifestyle. We may enter a decade in which only those rich enough can afford home appliances that don't share their data with a whole range of third-party suppliers.

4. Low Code/No Code. In the near term the rise of low code/no code solutions accelerates the democratisation of capabilities which were once the domain of business process optimisation experts (in hyper-automation, for example) and in particular those who held the keys to the code. Just as the power of the church was enhanced by its hold over reading and writing, or the power of capital is enhanced by ownership of the means of production, so placing the value realisation asset of code in the reach of more and more people, gives them power. Right now it enables the transformation of current capabilities and therefore capacities, at an increased rate.  People can be re-enabled to do the jobs that were once only open to writers of code. This provides more control and greater fit with need since end users of the product become the people creating the product. That's win number 1. But there is also a real benefit in giving people a much broader set of skills - making your teams more able to flex toward demand. When the business planning needs doing, the energy can be focused there. When the build needs doing, you gain more capacity to focus there. Low code/no code will transform how we work and what we work on - and bring us all closer to making products. Widespread adoption makes the organisation more responsive to the #contextshocks shaping and reshaping the ever more ambiguous future ahead.

5. Automation. Closely connected with Low Code/No Code as a trend, automation has focused on understanding processes, often very complex ones, and making them available at the touch of a button (or the trigger of a condition). The advent of AI to add to the RPA and Machine Learning mix makes it possible for the automation to be constantly self-learning and self-improving. Just as automation now plays a large part in Cloud deployment and management of infrastructure, a convergence with trends in Start-up, Low Code/No Code and Decentralisation lights up new roles for automation (as referenced in the notion that we are All Companies Now in Trend 2, Decentralisation.) Imagine having identified a new problem in an emerging future, you have created your POC. If the full services of Cloud deployment could be deployed by a smart AI on your behalf, all the IT skills required established as learnable processes, then even this layer of the hard bits of building a business could be offered as a service. Of course, automation will have increasing impact on very wide areas of our lives and you need only imagine any business process to identify and discern the repeatable from the learnable from the unknowable to map where automation can be deployed to help the humans focus on the less knowable.

6. Wellness. The evidence stacks up that when we measure and track our health, we maintain it more effectively. This extends to mental as well as physical wellbeing. Both have risen up the agenda in the last year because of the rate of change we have been exposed to. And while we may strive to maintain a growth mindset, the preference for efficiency at the heart of our energy-hungry brains drives us to seek certainty. We may be truth-seeking machines powered by doubt, but doubt is far from our preferred state. A range of new solutions which treat employees with the same focus on personalisation could enhance employee happiness and effectiveness. Imagine taking the data we are able to capture about our distributed teams' use of technology - could we identify when an individual works at their best, can we identify emerging unhappiness from rate of key stroke, use of language, changes in normal routines etc, and deploy smart and caring interventions. Positive psychology (eg go for a walk - we're locking you out of your screen for 1 hour, you need the break). Employees are already wearing bands to ensure they don't spend too much time using heavy machinery to avoid health impacts. Would we be prepared to allow our employers to access our wearable tech. Expect the insurance industry and workplace benefits to start aligning.

I'm going to consider 7,8 and 9 together.

7. Small pieces. Agile, rapid-iterative, responsive ways of working are pretty much the standard model for software development now. The focus on small pieces of rapidly completed chunks of work, in small focused but multi-disciplinary teams, is the norm in start-up land and has grown into scale up land (see companies such as Spotify, Zopa). It has extended into DevOps, DesOps and DevSecOps. The approach has extended to strategy, where the focus on insight into end user need drives a smarter way to create the future you intend. I have characterised this as Product-As-Strategy. Read more about that approach on this link.

8. Platform. Platforms bring people together who have a shared interest in solving a problem and provides ways for them to interface and contribute to solving that problem. In the last 20 years these have formalised and solidified around specific problems and formalised roles in solving them; eg Uber, Facebook. The future lays in a more open approach. The internet is the ultimate platform and offers the greatest access to problem-solving capabilities. Silo-ing the platform is a constraint on value. Future opportunities rise in supporting example new contexts such as 'We Are All Companies Now'. Bringing together people with a shared purpose may enable them to share and appify their business know-how, low code/now code built solutions of their business processes, made available to others to drag and drop into their own startup - business-as-a-service solutions.

9. Start-up. Start-up is a way of working. And its not unique to start-ups. Every start-up sets out to solve an end user problem. It is powered by the belief there is a better way to do something. To date this has required the lone entrepreneur to disappear into the garage and begin a lonely journey. On the plus side, they had belief in their solution - and something meeting an emerging need. On the minus side, they had little more than the vision. Future platforms may offer them the business-building-block apps to both validate to go/no-go rapidly and scale out fast when green-lit. But why should they have all the fun? Why shouldn't we enable our workforces as smartly? Large organisations which are able to appify their business capabilities, and make all of those capabilities widely available to all of their people effectively give start-up freedom to every employee - supported by enterprise knowhow and access to capital. Those that move first and fast to this new way of working unleash multiples of effectiveness, make better use of the human capital advantage to imagine better, and give themselves more and faster routes to meeting future need.

The narrative that 'We Are All Companies Now' offers a way to understand the impact of all these trends on how we live and work. Just as the narrative 'We Are All Publishers Now' did when I coined it in relation to the impact of the web on the world of media and publishing back in 2008.

At first the majority consumed what the minority produced as publishers. Today in 2020 almost everyone being entertained or informed by the web is also publishing (or at least distributing) what is produced.

So I expect the vast majority of us will want to continue to consume what the smaller number of us create as companies for quite some time to come. But I do expect more and more people to engage in the value creating activity we see enshrined in the formation of companies and while, as discussed in point 9 above, the first experience is likely to be in the context of an internal platform, it seems to me that the trends described here, taken in total, point towards a future in which how we create value and the organisations within which we do that, are reconfigured, just as the media industry has been disrupted.

Photo by David Travis on Unsplash

Product-As-Strategy: Start-up superpowers for BigCo

Legacy organisations face two big problems as we stumble out of the great backlog clearance of 2020 and face up to new realities.

• They are trading on previous market-making innovations - and the market has moved on.
• They have lost the know-how to make new things at speed.

The solution is Product-As-Strategy: The application of product management discipline to solve for future needs.

Every multi-national business starts life as a start-up. Every start-up was ignited by the passionate desire to fix something that was wrong with the way things were or that could be done better. They all identified a problem that faced people and went about solving it.

By their nature they were product based. They started with the sketch of an idea. They tested that idea as cheaply as they could. They built a response to it, as fast and as inexpensively as they could. They learnt from what they did. They reshaped to align ever better to what they learned.

They had fun doing it. They were excited about creating something new that people would value. They made breakthrough products and new markets.

Sound familiar?

What I've just described is not only the spark that founds an empire, it's the rapid-iterative, insight-led and experience-centred approach applied by the most successful product, service and experience designers. It accelerates the product through Ideate-Concept-Prototype-Launch-Monitor. It applies Design Thinking, MVP (minimum viable product), Lean Start-up and Agile principles to focus on what can be learned to create value for the end user with each iteration, With appropriate insight is can only ever fail forwards (pivoting towards value) if that can be called failure.

Bringing back this way of working, re-establishing it and making it real again is one part of future-proofing today's legacy organisations. It's a very important part because an organisation - as far as its customers is concerned - IS its products.

Delivering smart product process requires a range of solutions to tackle inertias found in large organisations, for example:

Finance - product teams are best when cross functional - so who funds what, who gets rewarded for what. And when the product is 'never finished' how do you budget? Product-centred budgeting within broader product strategies offer some pointers.

HR - Hierarchies tend to flatten and roles merge. Product teams are more like start-up teams where everyone is doing a bit of everything. Low-code/no code solutions are opening tech to business people and business ideation techniques like Design Thinking are opening business to tech people. We need more fuzzy people and that takes a new approach to roles, fluid and MVP job descriptions.

There are others to tackle around the challenges of silos in large companies - the kind of silos that don't exist in start-ups, that must also be overcome. 

And they can be, and are, overcome by businesses organising themselves around product every day - with different forms of organisation drawing from agile and holacracy. Spotify is a famous example of the 'agile management' approach in which the organisation consists of Squads, Tribes and Guilds.

To get started fast, the product management process can be deployed in single strategic function; with a ring fenced budget and allocated team. This can act as Proof of Concept.

But to make this more than a fast and effective way to clear your backlog (ie solving problems you have identified from the needs identified in past contexts), we must add a way of seeing the future.

This is where my framework for the Responsive Organisation can deploy.

In brief; when impacted by a context shock, we should map the consequences (1st,2nd,3rd order...) in a systems map, identifying new contexts and using both insight and imagination (foresight) to determine new needs emerging from the human experience in those new and consequent consequences.

Naturally, these should be selected for vs an organisations own ambitions.

But in selecting to serve the needs of customers that are yet to emerge the organisation can start creating the future it intends and therefore can embrace.

This provides strategic prioritisation for the products it should make and as they iterate (with insight fed in to every step) the product shapes ever close to meeting real need as it emerges.

This combination of identifying future market-making needs to solve against, and establishing the capabilty to meet those through rapid and insight-rich product iteration means:

• The organisation re-establishes its market-making position
• The organisation builds the muscle to respond to need at speed

That is Product-As-Strategy. Start-up Superpowers for Large Companies.

Photo by AbsolutVision on Unsplash

Zombie memories threaten our ability to handle uncertainty

What do we even mean by 'normal'. It's an important question as we navigate the oceans of uncertainty that have risen all around us in 2020. It's important because we are starting to bid 2020 goodbye (and good riddance) and ask each other what we think will happen next.

The simple act of asking what comes next reveals the crux of this challenge. We want predictability. We want to be able to repeat experiments in which A causes B. Reliably.

But perhaps our use of digital proxies for familiar ways of doing things are giving us a false sense of normality. We have built ourselves little islands of routine in which a mirage of normality can be maintained and while that aligns with our aversion to uncertainty, it leaves us at risk of convincing ourselves that life is becoming more predictable than the evidence around us would suggest.

Normal - in psychological terms - "means ways of being, and doing, things that are familiar. Things that we are used to doing, in the ways we are used to doing them," according to Dr Rowena Hill, a psychologist at Nottingham Trent University. She researches the human aspects of emergency management and disaster.

Aleks Krotoski in her BBC Sounds podcast Digital Human (series 20, Normal) coins the rather wonderful term Zoom-bie Apocalypse, echoing the way that ingrained behaviours forced Zombies back to shopping malls in the movies, so we congregate in Zoom calls trying to echo behaviours from our old world - the after work drinks, the dinner table chat. All of it more stilted, juddering and dislocated, digital proxies of actual social moments.

As Aleks points out, we are uncertainty averse. Our use of digital social proxies is a work around for us - offering us the ultimately unsatisfactory comfort of old familiar certainties.

It would be foolish to expect anything other than the unexpected in 2021, no matter what the comfort we may find in Zombie memories of our past lives.

The smart thing is to prepare for still more #contextshocks in which the consequences deliver new contexts in which new needs will emerge. The smart thing is to work to make yourself responsive, to play your part in learning from those new contexts, selecting how to respond to those needs and in doing so creating the future you both intend and can embrace.

#ResponsiveOrganisations (as I have published before) must task themselves with discovering and selecting the new needs they best serve and testing their way to serving them - accepting that IS prediction in our ocean of uncertainty.

2020 has been good for those with the deepest reserves. But living off your fat may not be the best preparation for what comes next.

2021 is likely to favour those best adapted to handling uncertainty, those ready to ditch the proxies and workarounds. Those with least to lose by admitting they don't have certainty - and prepared to test their way forward into what comes next.

  

Distributed working can drive a personalised approach to employee experience

Optimising employee experience for business benefit is an emergent trend of our increasingly digitally-connected but physically distributed work forces.

Gartner's Future of Work Trends - with data gathered in April this year - already identified 16% of employers admitted to increasing the gathering of passive employee data collection. For example: virtual logging/clocking in and out; computer and phone use; use of email, internal communication and chats; and location or movement.

The data is available to far more than 16% of companies. Working from home has rocketed to closer to 50%. There are ethical questions of course. The same ethical questions facing us as consumers. How relaxed we are about having our every key-stroke captured, stored, diced and used to serve us depends very much on the discernible benefits to us. Increasingly we want to understand what's in it for them, too.

But employers can use this passive employee data more effectively for carrot than for stick.

Given the reported 'burnout' experienced by many - the increase in monthly hours worked (with estimates running at 20-30 extra per employee per month), the physical and creative downsides of parking behind a computer all day, given all this and more, there are new opportunities emerging for data-driven, employer-led wellness interventions.

We are fine when our car tells us it's time to take a break after two hours in the driving seat - perhaps passive data can be used to enforce mental and physical screen breaks? And if, from aggregating data the employer can understand more about what makes an individual effective, even applying some of the A/B testing techniques so readily applied to us as live, real-time consumers, then perhaps demands on us, styles of communications, engagement in meetings, workshops, pitches et al, can start to be designed to suit end user needs with the kind of specificity we have long enjoyed as customers.

Welcome to insight-led, experience-centred, employee and workplace experience. We just have to treat employees with the same respect we have come to understand the customer must be treated with.

Photo by Charles Deluvio on Unsplash

Consensus starts with acknowledging shared beliefs

Win, lose or draw, unless we start realising we have more in common than there is to drive us apart, the real losers will always be the electorate.

As I write the result of the 2020 US Presidential Election is not yet in and thought to be going right to the wire.

And while it is easy to be swept along in hyperbole and vitriol, take a moment to remind yourself that most of us - all around the world - are more like each other than we aren't.

Let's start with what we all agree on. My guess is Democrat or Republican, Brexit Supporter or Remainer we all agree on things like:

1. Health and happiness for all
2. Prosperity for ourselves and neighbours.
3. Caring about and wanting to protect our families and neighbours.
4. Food, clothes and shelter
5. Education for all.

These are just some top-of-head thoughts. I'm sure you can think of others.

Some folk went to the trouble of listing these a few years ago... you may be familiar with them:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all (...) are created equal, that they are endowed ....with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

To solve the problems facing us needs all of us, coming together.

Culture and identify in the new future of work

Preparing for the new context of the Future of Work goes beyond the challenge of managing our connections and enabling old processes.

In previous discussions I have identified the limitations of Covid19 innovation to date in this space: A backlog clearing exercise in which the old 'important but not urgent' list suddenly became tagged 'urgent' too: A huge outpouring of effort to build what our experience of old contexts had suggested we need.

The context changed with Covid19 - making distributed working THE way of working among those ordinarily housed in offices. The 'go' button was hit - and hit hard - on tools to deliver productivity in quite traditional processes.

Now the context has changed again. Now it's not a matter of making the best, to patch up a response to muddle us through until we could go back to normal. Now there is the realisation that this new context is here to stay.

Sustained, distributed working comes with a new set of challenges to overcome.

One is cultural.

Where does culture reside when the office is shut? If I think of this from a network perspective, culture is an emergent property of the interactions within the network. The interaction, rather than the position of the nodes (and certainly not the physical position of the nodes) is the primary driver. 

How we enable those interactions has the biggest impact on culture not where we choose to work. With distributed working culture risks being diluted across space and time - and potentially by disconnected leadership.

If an interaction is planned, formal, one-way, hierarchical etc, the culture will reflect all of these.

If the interaction is adhoc, informal, two-way, flattened etc, a different culture is likely to emerge.

The current tools at our disposal tend to the former (I'm very open to hearing alternative views on this) and given the urgenct need to enable somewhat more open, flat, innovative ways of working to handle extremes of ambiguity, it is time to get out of 'backlog' mode and design towards the needs of this new context.

Another relates to our identity

What of the nodes - the people - you and I?

The way in which we, very social, naturally co-operative humans, handle our new distributed - increasingly isolated - paradigm is critical.

How can our digital tools and processes map to key human needs essential to our identities - such as:

1. Our sense of autonomy. When lockdown very clearly constrains our freedom, our sense of control over our own lives and our ability to choose, our technologies - and how we design our use of them, must seek to restore these elements. The paralysing communication defect of slide presentations devoid of anything more than a voice over - and little sense of audience feedback - is one example where design is yet to catch up with the needs of the new context. We need our audience to respond to us, we need to see their smiles and nods. And if the bandwidth can't cope, we have to virtualise a proxy.

2. Our sense of relatedness. Social distancing is breaking down how much we feel others may care about us. This is an area in which distributed and diluted leadership is having a negative impact. And it's a two-way street. Can we become comfortable signalling our need for a little TLC via digital means? Face to face an empathetic leader creates some of their greatest impact by recognising this and responding to what they recognise. Tools that alert and inform, perhaps even via automated emotion tracking in facial and written comms, could help. But be warned - appointing a minister of fun or similar happiness monitor is unlikely to get the result you seek. Happiness is most often an emergent quality of a well-performing team. Delivering more effective tools to collaborate will drive greater team cohesion (and therefore more sense of care about each other) than any amount of time-boxed merry making.

3. Our sense of competence. In times of huge ambiguity, acknowledging and rewarding all learning experiences can help us feel this sense of achievement. Tools reflecting the small, achievable goals in agile, desops and devops should be considered for broader use across rapid, iterative, MVP-disciplined ways of working. Master what is in front of you. Learn what needs to be learned to solve this task.

Tools and processes reflecting these three areas (psychologist call it the ARC of happiness) can help secure a positive sense of identity at a time when our identity is under significant threat from the ending of the work/home divide. 

In order to sustain creativity, the level of cultural connect that makes a collection of people more than the sum of its parts, our design of the Future of Work must be informed by a reality which now looks set to be with us for years rather than months.

Photo by Carson Arias on Unsplash

The economy's job is to create a safe and just space for us!

Every time a politician or newscaster refers to 'our' need to save the economy an alarm bell rings in my head. It should in yours, too.

The role of the economy is to prioritise the creation of a safe and just space for humanity.

It's not to deliver GDP or shareholder value. They follow.

If you follow the wrong kpis, you behave the wrong way. The UK's Johnson government is not alone in getting this wrong. It's a global narrative which has grown with the adoption of GDP as a measure of success. A, literally, toxic measure for the planet. Your people can be dieing early from pollution with close correlation to GDP rising, for example. Hardly a wise relationship between resource and need.

As we continue to hurtle headlong through what the UN decribes as The Decisive Decade we have to reclaim this narrative in order to re-establish the correct order or things (expressed in diagram form, here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/never-all-economy-stupid-david-cushman/.

As identified in Doughnut Economics and enshrined in the UN Sustainable Development Goals,

Our role isn't to save the economy. It's the economy's job to create a safe and just space for us!

The stories we tell, the language we use, it has deep power to shape the way we think, respond and behave. I am hopeful that it has the power to transform how we see our relationship with the ecosystem we reside in, too.

So let's start challenging our politicians and our media each time we hear them use the language of subservience to the economy.  It is not your master, we are its. It only exists to do our bidding - to allocate resources as effectively as possible to create a safe and just space for us.

The 'economy' is what emerges from all the interactions of resource and humans. We can shape towards more positive (safe and just) outcomes for us only when we realise our ownership of it and take back control.

That starts with shifting our point of view, changing the way we talk about success, encouraging new measures of success aligned to the unveiled reality that we are the masters of the economy and we control it to do our bidding.

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

Sustainability by design in product, service and experience

Sustainability has long been tracked and traced in supply chain. There has been some good work in business process, too. But, to date, there has been little focus on building it into our product, service and experience life cycles.

My perspective as a customer-focused, digital insight-to-value innovation expert, has informed my development of the Planet Experience (PX) framework. The framework acknowledges the importance of providing end-user value for the planet, in the same way that Customer Experience (CX) has been the focus of all successful digital innovation, business models and transformations of the last 20 years.

PX elevates the status of the planet in our sustainable success - just as CX elevated the status of customers. No longer is the planet something to exploit, it is something to build a relationship of mutual benefit with. Through the PX filter it is something to purposefully design a relationship of mutual benefit with.

In order to deliver great CX we have to have great data about customer needs in the context of their lives: Insight. Feeding this in, at every iteration - testing what we are making for the end user, with the end user - is as sure a route to success as we can hope for.

Coupled with the typical market, business and technical constraints of desirability, viability and feasibility, we have a framework for value innovation.

Now we must find the equivalent for delivering great PX.

Viability and feasibility are adjusted by focus on PX. But what are they, and desirability, informed by? Where do we get our PX insight. And how do we make the acquisition of that PX insight affordable and fast enough to keep pace with rapid iterative product/service/experience development life cycles?

Of course, the voice of the customer - the CX data - is a strong indicator of what they will find acceptable vs what you plan to do for/with/to the planet. And it will be an important validation point which can be included in the kind of anthropological research conducted to great effect with platforms such as UserTribe.

In addition we must now add a way of answering the business questions about impact on the planet with data that goes beyond the human response - accessing the potential risk too/ impact on/ benefits for the ecosystem. 

For this we must access scientific expertise/research - delivered in the bite-sized time frames of agile and rapid iterative product life cycles - and framed in direct response to the relevant business-impact questions. That is, we must provide the business interface to the scientific expertise.

This is precisely where we have now reached with Planet Experience. The concept is in place and we are ready to test with pioneering prospective clients.

If you and your business are ready to lead the way in building sustainability into your products, services and experiences - placing PX on the same pedestal you would CX - step forward and be ready to lead.

Analysis by PwC in 2018 showed while 72% of companies mention the UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in their annual reporting, only 27%, to date, include them in their business strategy. What that says is that they value sustainability - but struggle to make it part of their business as usual.

PX and PX Insight is a way to build planet positivity into everything you  make and do - with these key business benefits:

1. In acting fast - being proactive - you gain market leadership and get ahead of legislation.
2. You attract and retain customers, talent, investment.
3. Drive creative innovation.
4. Reduce risk to supply chain.
5. Cut energy costs.
6. Cut raw materials costs.
7. Cut water costs.
8. Cut waste disposal costs.
9. Savings fund transformation costs.
10. Sustains the eco-system in which you wish to seek to continue to generate profits.

Explore PX here.

Photo by Bill Oxford on Unsplash

The high price of low cost hires

Forbes' recent article on ageism in the jobs market triggered recognition among over 45s (hands up). And trepidation among those approaching the big 4-oh.

But I think a lot of that reaction is confirmation bias. If you've been seeking a new role in this toughest of times, the anecdotes of the Forbes article - and of many folks experiences - confirm the age paranoia that besets a society which often appears to bow to the alter of youth.

But I want to offer a little reassurance and a little less fatalism.

Let's consider where we are. In simple terms the jobs market can be split into three broad parts.

1. Those that make things. 

    In the digital realm I have made my career in, that's the coders and engineers.

2. Those that work out what we should make. 

    Call that strategy and innovation. Product, service and experience design.

3. Those that sell the things that have been made. 

    Sales teams of every hue, from BDMs to consultative client partners.

As I outlined in The Great Backlog Clearance - many a panicked organisation has been caught with its pants down by Covid-19. Finally waking to the urgency of digital transformation, the first thing they have done is got on with the seriously overdue and overlong to-do list they have built up in back-log over a decade or more. 

They know what they want to make. So they need people to make it.

If they were smart they would revalidate desirability, feasibility and viability with the strategy and innovation folk. But many have just 'gone-for-it!'. 

This 'making it' market is mostly served by younger people. Get good at coding or engineering and (way too often) you get promoted into the kind of VP roles that move you out of doing and into thinking. And in the current climate - priced out of a job.

Those in the third part of my break-down, the sellers, they are in demand. They will be in increasing demand. Mostly because when you just crack through your backlog without engaging the strategy and innovation folk, you end up making things people don't want. That gets increasingly hard to sell. The first response is to throw more money at the sell-it part. In time this fails too - and we will see a return to demand for the strategy and innovation folks.

The sales roles are often seen as for the under 45s, too. But there are sales roles in which experience, subject matter expertise and the connections of a lifetime in the world of work, really do count. I'm talking consultative selling. Selling big ideas to bigco.

And these thoughts about the value of experience suggest that instead of seeing our age as a barrier to winning that next role, we should position it as a value proposition. Borrowing from Marcus Aurelius, what is in the way, becomes the way.

So if your age is the barrier (and forgiving that legally, it cannot be) - make it a value proposition. Your age is a powerful thing:

Other companies have had to invest millions of dollars/pounds/euros in creating the person you are today. They invested to enable your experience, skills, extensive network of valuable connections, resilience - and wisdom. 

Now A.N Other business can acquire all that for a fraction of the money previously invested in you. They even get to pay for it in monthly instalments!

Over 45s are an absolute bargain: They (ok, we) represent an acquisition opportunity it would be foolhardy to pass over in favour of a 'cheaper' investment.

There is a reason newer job market entrants cost less to acquire.

I can't leave without resharing this: (3 professional footballers vs 100 kids).

Photo by James Lee on Unsplash

The Great Backlog clearance. Building stuff people used to need.

We are in the midst of the Great Backlog Clearance. Innovating backwards.

Granted - there is some smart, future-creating innovation being driven in pockets, but the majority of commercial activity right now has defaulted to a realisation that all that stuff we had been happy adding to backlogs, feeling in the rush of pre-Covid BAU that it could wait, we now realise is an urgent must have.

We've been generating quite a long-list for several years. Now a lot of organisations are hurtling head-long through their to-dos in a game of digital catch-up.

Hence the market demand for people who can make the stuff on that to-do list. Coders, engineers. Nuts and bolts folk. Of course, as the backlog becomes the product to ship, you then need folk to sell it. Hence the current demand for people to sell stuff you've made.

So - people who make the stuff you are in a dash to catch up with. People to sell stuff when you make it.

When you are clearing the backlog, what you don't need is people to tell you what needs to be made. There's so much to do, already, right?

Hence the lack of demand in the insight-to-innovate space.

While this may feel like the appropriate response to difficult economic circumstances, it is, instead, a short-cut to mid-term decline. Dealing with the backlog is dealing with past demand, generated in the context of a different (pre-Covid) world. One which is changed for a minimum of three years and perhaps forever.

You are building responses based on invalid insight. You are innovating backwards. You are building things people used to want. That may feel like you are getting stuff done, but it is not serving the new needs of the new contexts. It is supply to an out-moded demand.

The Responsive Organisation is seeking to build better from change. It is not looking at what it should have done in the old context. It is seeking to understand the new contexts, imagining the experience of its customers in the new, next and possible contexts of the now and next system we are feeling are way through. And it is moving fast to serve those new needs.

It is asking itself, what needs to be made now?

It is enabling the mindset, ways of working, collaborations and commercial approaches, and access to technology, to deliver best-fit solutions for the new and next nows.

So if you are busying yourself building out your pre-Covid backlog - stop. 

Reassess your backlog; revalidate the insight; start from live understanding of need in new contexts, to press the go button on your insight-to-innovate investment. Start responding to now and next.

Lift you head up, look around. You're not in Kansas anymore.

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

Whatever happened to social media?

When I started out as a social media pro I did so with a belief that social delivered something extra and different that media didn't. This was a world of The Arab Spring and of the post-riot, self-organised clean-up of London's streets.

Social promised a way of building relationships - bringing people together who shared the same purpose, to not just talk about things, but to find that they cared enough about the same purpose that the would choose to DO something to make things better.

It offered an open and two-way door to the customer. It offered a platform to bring together people of shared purpose to create things that mattered to them - meeting their needs with a new level of accuracy and fidelity. It was potentially transformative for the way not just marketing was done, but for product, service and experience design with the customer genuinely at the heart.

I pushed the 'customer-led' vs customer-centric agenda - arguing that to be customer-led was to build a relationship of trust in which each partner had the other's best interests at heart. Customer-Led became one of the 10 Principles of Open Business defined in my book.

I suggested to our clients that it would not be long before there would be a Director of Social Media in every boardroom - driving the customer-led agenda, pouring insight into every business decision, shaping products and services to be the co-created near-perfect fit with end-user need.

I summed it up the additional value of social media over traditional media in diagrams like this from 2009:

and this:

From my article 'The social media bum steer' in 2010.

So why is professional social media so far distant from that promise today? It seems to me the focus has been too great on 'media' to the detriment of 'social'. I've seen the organisations in which the CEO has sat down with Zuckerberg and colluded on achieving 1m Likes! Vanity metrics have taken over from value metrics. Social Media has become just another place to broadcast your message in. A channel.

It has drifted too hard and fast towards being just another ad. And ads, by their nature, are about convincing people they need something, when the focus should be on connecting people to make something.

Perhaps the 'Director of Social Media' role on the board has been taken by the Director of CX?

The value in social comes from understanding that it:

• Delivers insight for not only CX, but also for product and service design. 
• Makes insight interactive and ongoing - providing a relationship-building dialogue with customers.
• Offers a platform for purpose-inspired connection and co-creation aligning directly to end user need
• Provides P2P opportunities to communicate via authentic relationships.
• Is the connection with customers that every successful company needs.

Our buying our way to eyeballs and the platforms ongoing refusalto be anything more than (increasingly monopolistic) media companies doesn't up.

But we can reclaim the value social media always promised if we remember - It's social first. Media second. 

It's time social media grew up and started delivering on all the human-centred extra value we have always known it can create.

One last image from more than a decade ago...

Photo by NordWood Themes on Unsplash

The power of asking the wrong question

 Sometimes the problem isn't the problem. The problem is the question.

And that, in itself, is a problem for...er problem solving.

Let me explain. Imagine you have a client has asked you to build a better mousetrap.

You may spend many a fruitless hour seeking incremental improvements. You set off a stream of work on spring mechanics. Another on bait testing. Still another expends effort on reducing the number and cost of moving parts. After much effort you present you MVP. It ain't going to remake the market.

But what if we reframe the problem - by asking a different question?

How do I rid buildings of mice?

Now we have a world of new possibilities to explore - sonic and scent deterrents, scare cats, etc.

Sometimes the problem isn't the problem. The problem is the question. It introduces constraints that need not be applied.

Photo by Ricky Kharawala on Unsplash

Track and trace trash tech enables instant fines

Fast Food retailers are leading the way with a new track and trace initiative which will enable local authorities to identify - and fine - those who dump their trash where they shouldn't.

Each item of packaging will carry a unique code. The code gets associated with a customer at point of purchase when an electronic payment is made. When you tap your card or phone, your bank details act as your unique identifier. If that packaging is subsequently found as litter by local authority collectors - on pavements, in hedges or otherwise carelessly discarded in the environment - the item can be scanned and the 'owner' identified.

Initially offenders will be contacted with advice on taking better care of their planet. But repeat offenders face a fixed penalty of £80 with fines rising to £2500 if they fail to pay on time or fail to learn their lesson.

If only, huh?

Is this really just my weekend daydream - an example of imagination leaping ahead of technology?

You tell me. What stands in the way of making this happen? How could you make it simpler?

Please share this with someone I don't know who may not like it

Every connection is valuable. But some connections are more valuable than others.

Network theorists have long known the way we connect is rarely random. We cluster. At its worst that means echo-chamber and group think. We follow, read, work with only the people we agree with. And our world becomes smaller as a result.

When you want to tackle the hard problems you need more variance in approaches, ways of thinking, life experience, cultural norms, belief systems, neural diversity as much as gender, age and ethnicity.

Network Theory tells us one extra node on our network has the potential to double the number of connections. But not if it simply reinforces your cluster. To repeat what you are doing, repeat the kind of connections you have. To change - and grow - what you are doing, seek difference.

Problems don't get much harder than the ones facing us today - economically, socially, environmentally, politically. Now is not a time to seek people like you.

Each new connection with someone outside your clusters opens your door to a new cluster.

This is true of problem solving, business development, team and organisational design.

So please share this with someone I don't know who may not like it.

Thanks.

Photo by Matthieu Joannon on Unsplash

5G offers a very human competitive advantage in the future of work

How can we put the human back into our digital connections? As we settle into patterns of work-from-home and work-from-anywhere, the challenge becomes ever more acute.

While we have seen and achieved obvious benefits for productivity, carbon footprint, work-life etc we have yet to understand the negative impact on ideation, inspiration and social communication.

The office still holds the whip hand for all these. But many companies were already working around that - and intend to do so in the future. Some have always worked virtually - and have long experience in ideation sessions - from chats to workshops - online.

So while the ideal scenario may be one in which we 'get things done' at home, and we 'get creative' in the office (see: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/now-we-realise-offices-creativity-home-delivery-david-cushman/) the reality for many already precludes that separation.

Hence the need to put more humanity into our digital connections.

There is some simple stuff you can do now: Have a chat, go off topic, have agenda-free open discussions, schedule time for those and schedule time for when you aren't available (and you are getting things done).

Perhaps less obvious is replicating some of the benefits of being together and away from your desk.

For example - walking meetings. In a walking meeting you share an environment and an experience - you share the same stimuli as you move through a space - and can use these a s reference points and jump-offs.

Neuroscientist Dominique Ashby (https://www.linkedin.com/in/dominiqueashby/) tells me the same effect can be virtualised by (for example) taking a shared virtual tour of a museum or tourist site. You could also try taking your meeting on a walking tour with you - sharing your view as you walk through park / city etc.

What are you trying and what results are you getting?

The arrival of 5G could be transformative. 5G solves the latency problem - the one which means that much of our non-verbal communication is lost in a video call because we don't get an up-to-the-micro-second, real time, view of every micro muscle movement in the person on the screen.

5G's extremely low latency rate, the delay between the sending and receiving of information is just one millisecond. 4G, for example, offers 200 milliseconds. That's faster than humans can react to. 

In theory not only is this the key to not only truly immersive VR on a mass scale (and imagine the impact on 'office' life of that in itself) but could also feel, genuinely, as if the person is in the room with you - restoring much of what we currently lose in our digitally delayed dialogues.

First movers in 5G will have the potential to gain a competitive advantage in the future of work.

Stay close to that - it could be as significant a value creator and differentiator as the getting your internet play right was just a few short years ago.

Photo by NeONBRAND on Unsplash

Innovators think differently - deal with it

To innovate is to be creative. Innovators are natural open thinkers. The kind of people who make connections - exploring the consequences of the consequences.

We revel in the navigation of the ambiguous. We are comfortable - almost certain - that the shortest route is rarely the fastest. We think organically, not in straight lines.

We reframe, looking at problems from new angles, we synthesise adjacent scenarios, we turn things on their head and shake them. We go off on tangents, journeys of discovery. Sometimes we have to retrace our steps. Sometimes we make huge leaps. 

Sometimes you will wonder where we are going. Sometimes you will struggle to keep up.

We thrive in complex and chaotic times - where cause and effect is often unclear. 

We have the mindsets and approaches to discover and support emergent and novel practice. This is essential now that the 'best' and 'good practice' of what we thought we knew, no longer helps.

The industrial mindset struggles with this. It wants clarity and certainty. It wants expertise - where there can be none (how can you be expert in the new?).

Design Thinking provides something of an interface between the innovator and the industrialist. It offers the tools to open up the more convergent thinkers, while providing the frameworks to constrain the most butterfly of brains toward the task at hand. 

Lean Start-up brings an even harder focus on value and on following the insight - with its introduction of Pivot. 

And Agile (at least in its approach to small pieces of work in small teams in rapid sprints of work) offers a way of working beyond the prototype that maintains the focus on insight and end-user value.

I have applied all of the above in varying combinations to product and service design. I have applied them to strategy, too. For years.

The problem for some organisations needing to make their leap right now is that there are still gatekeepers who retain the industrial mindset. It's the mindset that seeks efficiency first. They want the one-pager, the certainty of the business plan, the easy of A follows B. It is how they are used to consuming information. Documents not conversations. Boxes to tick.

And that's a problem - because that's not how the world works and it makes them less able to recognise or trust in the value of the organic, systems thinking, lateral excursions of just the people they need. 

The obvious and easy world is gone. It's hard to acknowledge and deal with that change. Humans like easy. Change, learning new things, doing different things - all take much more brain energy and effort. It's much harder to explore than to travel the same route you have a thousand times before.

But Covid19 gave us a Context Shock revealing this trend away from the obvious and easy towards complexity and challenge.This trend - and its inherent demand for the innovation mindset - has been accelerating since the dawn of digital.

It's time to encourage and welcome the explorers. 

Start with yourself.

Photo by Jiroe on Unsplash

When almost every human interaction is a 'meeting'

A very smart connection of mine shared his list of rules for effective meetings. They were drawn up pre-Covid19. And I believe there are many circumstances in which they remain 100 per cent valid. You should download them for yourself and use them as appropriate.

But the list of best practices prompted me to think about the pivotal role now held by meetings in the organisational life of distributed teams. Where once they were simply part of the toolbox of human interaction prompts and touch points within an organisation, today, as we seek to maintain connection from our homes, they have become almost the only show in town.

If you have a sudden flash of inspiration, the kind you used to be able to call out to the person sitting by your side, or opposite your desk, now you have to go schedule a zoom/teams etc call. And the protocols of agendas, timing, note taking, action points, co-availability and all the rest may be too high a transaction cost for that idea. So you might just not bother raising it at all.

So in the current context I am wary of suggesting any best practice surrounding meetings.

In working with distributed teams for many years, I have learned that effective meetings start with social connection - the chat bit that we may think is non-productive, but which has huge value for team wellbeing, empathy building and well, caring about each other.

I get that other 'coming togethers' can handle the serendipity and idea sparks we are missing in our current daily interactions but I also think it may be wise to avoid any dogma around what is or isn't the right way to run a meeting when our contexts are changing so rapidly.

This is a time in which best practices will seldom be applicable, in which, instead, novel and emergent practices should be tested in order to shape a way forwards.

What we do know is high performing teams have strong empathy for each other, and enjoy an 'equity of conversation' - ie they all talk for about the same share of time when they are interacting.

Perhaps those are the initial constraints we should try applying to explore what meetings may become?

Photo by Alex McCarthy on Unsplash

Offices are places to create, not deliver.

When we established the Collaboratory space at Cognizant - with its inspiring tech access and demos, creative, soft-furnished spaces, multiple screens, writable surfaces everywhere you turned (etc), one side effect was workspace envy.
Colleagues more usually housed in row-upon-row of hot desks (when not on client sites) at the European HQ in London found multiple excuses to use the Think-Create-Make spaces a handful of us called home. They preferred to hold meetings in there, to chat with friends, to get creative.
I recall lobbying global HQ to consider rolling out the Collaboratory concept to become standard practice for all Cognizant office space.
Perhaps, at this time of crisis for the office, it's time to review that possibility?
The threat to the office/opportunity for new and better ways of working came up at last night's, increasingly regular, Beers & Ideas. Contributions came from Rory Yates, Jessica Yates, Pete Ahearn and Dean Corney.
We noted the two-speed nature of the journey 'back to work' - with those who had no choice but to be physically present at work being exposed to the greatest risks. We considered that those who had a choice should consider using it to offer some protection to those who don't.
We noted that home work brought environmental, local community and productivity advantages but that we had yet to understand the impact of our lack of human interaction on creative thought, serendipity and, of course, well-being.
The office is not dead. But it may be about to undergo a metamorphosis of the caterpillar to butterfly variety. We will continue needing spaces to come together, to be together. But those spaces may focus on the needs our social time best serve.
We will need less space for 'bums on seats' placed in dreary rows. Instead we will need spaces to ideate, create concepts, get hands on with prototypes. The office space should transform to one proactively designed for human interaction, prompting and promoting serendipity.
We will visit such spaces to actively spend face-to-face time with other people - rather than check-in, log-on and head-down. We can do the latter so much better at home. But the former - the bits that define what we could and should be heads-down about, that is the role of the office post-Covid19.
It may be a day a week or a week a month. The important realisation is that offices should be places optimised to create - the home can be where we get focused on the work and get the delivery done.
Like so many other trends that this Context Shock has revealed and accelerated - this one has been a long time coming.
Teams are already coping with a great deal of change - much of it sub-optimal. So, rather than watch the office stagger back on to its feet, let's see it leap forward and play its part in the creation of a new and better way of working.

Photo by Hillary Ungson on Unsplash

Practical Innovation Training: The Responsive People Program

Responsive People - My Keynote presentation: Future of Work 2020

How Responsive Organisations build the future they intend

My thanks to the community and organisers of Transcending The Crisis for allowing me the opportunity to discuss Responsive Organisation, Context Shocks and Responsive People.
30 Minutes I really enjoyed - and I hope you can find time to, too.

Thank you in particular to Mark Buchan and Si Alhir.

It never was all about the economy -stupid

Context Shocks - as Covid19 demonstrates time and again - reveal trends that the system was already aligned to generate.
We have seen it in distributed working, reimagining of the city, targeted education etc.
Another very significant one reveals itself in the level of state intervention required when markets fail in their primary task - to allocate resources vs human need.
This is an interesting challenge to the western political hegemony - in which the tendency is toward 'In The Market We Trust'. It has seemed there is no problem the market couldn't handle.
But rather like a Prime Minister 'taking personal control' of any and everything that appears to be going off the rails, it turns out - somewhat ironically, that the market only has a limited amount of political capital to spend. And it is all spent out.
The massive scale of state intervention around the world (another £100bn of quantitative easing announced in the UK yesterday) reveals a trend to truth - that the role of The economy is subservient to the Government, not the other way around.
The capacity and necessity of massive state involvement illustrates this truth.
And this trend to truth reveals another, just as important. The state intervention is to meet the needs of people. Given our perilously constrained resources - it is also to meet the needs of the planet. There's no people, government or economy without the planet.

So, the content shock of Covid19 gives us a new context in which to experience, and in this new experience we can imagine, and are starting to observe:
The role of Government is to gather insight about the needs of people and planet.
The role of the economy is to gather insight about the needs of Government and the needs of people.
The role of the economy is then to respond to the needs of Government (and people and planet)
The role of Government is then to respond to the needs of People & Planet.

With this we do at least have a simple way of describing the systems goals. Feedback loops flowing between people and planet, between Government and Economy and all combinations thereof will need to be understood and managed in order to steward the right outcomes.
But at least we can establish some clarity about who and what the outcomes are intended to benefit.
It never was about all about the economy - stupid.

Recover: Helping social impact entrepreneurs to build back better

Are you ready to play your part as we Build Back Better?

Join me for a unique event tailored to helping Social Impact businesses recover, stronger and more able to fulfil their visions of a new better.

Recover: Equipping Social Impact Businesses To Build Back Better is on July 3. It's entirely pro bono. Tickets cost what ever you can afford to give to the UNHCR Urgent Appeal For Refugees - COVID19.

Expert help comes from Ragnar Agnell, Frank Kelcz, Owen Valentine Pringle FRSA, Gareth Dean, and Dr Gary Coulton

And I'll be sharing my approach to #Planet Experience

Follow the link to register.

Follow this link to watch videos from the event: https://2y3x.com/videos/july-social-impact-event-recordings/

Let's talk about the Responsive Organisation

I'm going to be talking in more detail about The Responsive Organisation, benefiting from Context Shock and how we can become Responsive People, at The Future of Work 2020 on June 25.
Registration is open:
Registration link: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_1HwKO81IT5ORyj0JY2yrHQ

The future doesn't just happen. It is up to you

There is only one scenario in which the future happens to you - the one in which you take no action.

The future is, quite literally, what you make it. It isn't some weird place, separate from us and our decisions. It is entirely the result of our collective response - our actions taken - to the present and our anticipation of our own needs and those of others in the context of now and next.

By its nature the future contains anything that is possible. If it's possible, it can happen.

Some of those possibilities are beyond our control (The emergence of a pandemic is a good example - and even in these it is our response that allows us to control our experience of them).

However - most possible outcomes are the result of our responses. We are imagining and deciding the future we intend to live in.

I am not dismissing the structural frameworks that limit the choices of many people now. I am saying the collective choices we make now are deciding how those frameworks get to impact the lives of people in the future.

In the future, our needs will be the same. The context in which we experience them will vary.

It is in our understanding of those needs in the emerging contexts of the future that we are able to shape the future we intend.

We can allocate our resources to probe for them, make sense of them and serve them.

This is the promise of the Responsive Organisation: It is not simply to test and learn all possible futures - it is to provide the mindset and ways of working to create the future you can imagine and intend. That is, one:

• Informed by insight,
• Ignited by imagination
• Centred on the human experience
• Constrained by the resources and goals of the organisation.

If it's a future you intend to have a future, it should also be constrained by making a positive response to the needs of people and planet.

• Your North Star Amid The Ambiguity of the Next Two Years: Learn, Learn, Learn.
• How To Respond To Context Shocks
• Learned Personal Antifragility
• Being Change - The Responsive Organisation Needs Responsive People
• The New Better of Work - The best of distributed teams and office life
• People Audits - When your people aren't coping
• Urgent Digital Transformation
• Accelerated Trend to Automation