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
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