The illusion of power and the rise of the right

Some advice for politicians who would counter the rise of the right - at least in the UK: If you want to stop the rise of Farage, recognise and respond to the fake hope of power he dangles to a disenfranchised people, fix the infrastructure issues - and that starts with a return to more equitable approaches to the distribution of wealth - last seen more than 50 years ago.

The secret sauce for Farage is a heady mix of power and fear. Power: The electorate feels disempowered because Governments of all hues have got closer and closer to capital. They no longer fear labor, and have little control over capital. What Governments are actually able to achieve has reduced (with Blair handing the last lever to the Bank of England durinig his term). As Edwina Currie put it "We used to fight dragons, now we just clear up the shit". If Governments can do little for their people, the power the electorate feels it may have to solve its own problems, also collapses.

Into this power vacuum: made-up solutions that feel within grasp - giving the electorate the illusion of power. 

In the UK this is currently manifesting as a fear of immigration. The 'other' is always an easy target. Remember all the taking-back-control rhetoric of Brexit? Primarily this related to borders - with precious little sign of success.

Nigel Farage and his Reform company/party identifies that people feel they have little control. He identifies the usual issues - strain on infrastructure (housing, health, jobs), security fears (policing, armed forces). These are huge issues that a nation of 69 million people fears are getting worse (though the evidence for this decline is patchy, at best).

Farage gives people the illusion of control - of power over their lives - by offering a simple, visible fix they believe is in their grasp: stop the boats - aka (when you listen to his supporters) stop immigration.

Vote Farage, stop the boats = all my problems go away.

Patent nonsense, of course from a rational point of view (how would removing 100,000 people from a population of 69,000,000 suddenly fix our infrastructure challenges)? Farage will never fix your problems with that magic wand. But big emotion-laden lies stick. How are those sunlit uplands of Brexit his supporters promised?

It's all a great distraction from the real issue - the insidious transfer of wealth from the vast majority to an increasingly super rich minority. Politicians must take back control of more capital to fix this - exactly what the right - Farage and his rich buddies included - is terrified of. Tough. There is no other fix.

This is your copilot speaking...

 Ladies and Gentlemen... this is your copilot speaking - busting out of the code closet and sashaying right through your working day.

Seems to me the big win in technology is in the moment we forget it's there. Like electricity... or digital... you use it in your daily work but it's so ingrained you never need to stop and think about it being there, you just get on with the job.
It looks like MS Copilot is a leap toward that state - we'll know a little better when the roll-out starts on September 26 - part of a free update to windows 11 (seamless is rarely a word I would use with a windows update, but let's see).
MS says: " It will work as an app or reveal itself when you need it with a right click. We will continue to add capabilities and connections to Copilot across to our most-used applications over time in service of our vision to have one experience that works across your whole life."
The critical and rarely discussed part in this is the experience. And it goes beyond UI or UX. To pull off a *seamless* experience requires deep embedding in the software, indeed across the tech stack.
I had an interesting conversation with folk at Cognizant recently who believe this need to know software engineering, tech stack, and UI/UX, places firms like theirs in the driving seat as the race to seamless #genai sets off.
I've always said ease of use trumps technical capability every time. But the winners tend to have both, in spades.

Our digital future

There is a point in the not too distant future in which every aspect of our lives will be digitally recorded. What could that mean for the role of our own memories, the ability to revisit any point in our lives, and  the possibility of creating digital clones? In combination with lives increasingly lived in digital realms, comes the extraordinary possibility for us to go back and revise and even relive our lives.

The direction of (time) travel

We are born with a limited tool for time travel - our memory. With it we can wind back the years. A sight, sound, touch or smell can send us spiralling back to a moment in time. But our memories are incomplete. We augment them with diaries and photographs... and more lately with blogs, social media, videos. The opportunity to record our lives has grown with our use of the web, been accelerated by our use of web2 and is set to grow exponentially with the arrival of Web3, and its experience layer, the Metaverse. The more digital 'memories' we have, the less we need to rely on our own memories. If you don't remember who was at a dinner you hosted, a quick google among your saved images will give you the answer.

The more we immerse ourselves in digital realms, the more our actions and behaviours can be digitally recorded. If we follow the direction of travel, there comes a point when our entire lives are recorded digitally. And that presents us with some extraordinary opportunities - and some philosophical challenges.

Rewind and re-experience anything you've ever experienced

Part of the final leap to 100% recorded lives will be lives lived 100% in the digital realm. Let's call that the Metaverse. Vague memories of being 'in the room when it happened' will be replaced by the capability to zoom back to the moment you were in that room. As sensory technologies advance you won't just watch a rerun, you will be able to feel the experience just as it happened. Dickens Ghost of Christmas Past has nothing on the future we are building for ourselves.

The rise of the digital clone

If those digital memories can get even close to capturing a 360-degree understanding of your skills, behaviours and activities, the next step would be to make a copy of you. Think a 3D avatar chatbot that knows what you do and can learn to respond like you would (this is the basic of artificial intelligence). Now you really could be in two places at once, performing multiple functions with multiple groups of people in multiple digital locations - all at once. Forget the grunt work of Robotic Process Automation, here come the digital clones to do all the knowledge work.

Groundhog lives

If you could have your time over, what would you have different. When would you have said yes when you said no - and vice versa. The intriguing possibility offered by the 100%  digital life is that you could go back and explore alternative outcomes shaping alternative life stories across the vast expanse of a Multiverse in which others are also seeking their own perfect lives. The shifting sands of existing in this kind of world, where even time no longer travels universally forwards challenge so much of what we hold to be true about life, to date.

Infinity and beyond

If we ever get done perfecting our lives, and we reach the point where we can record and capture how we feel emotionally - along side how we act and what we know -we may be ready to abandon our human bodies altogether. In the Metaverse you can exist digitally for ever. You can be transmitted at the speed of light and explore the entire universe over eons of time.

Rebalance inequalities to build the trust you need to win in ecosystems

 

The situation: Employees have been taken for granted for too long. Rampant and widening pay inequality between those at the top and those in the ranks is just one measure of an unequal world spiralling out of balance. CEO compensation rose 1,322% between 1978 and 2020. Typical worker pay? 18% (Source: The Economic Policy Institute (EPI). The pandemic – and the resulting Great Resignation - coupled with the rapidly emerging business paradigm of HFS OneEcosystem, is creating a perfect storm ready to sweep talent and partnerships away from those who focus only on shareholder value and towards those prepared to align themselves with a wider group of stakeholder needs; employees, partners, society, and our planet, among them.

Employees have become mercenary – moving from gig to gig for money and perks. The only weapon leaders have to resist with is more money and more perks. That’s a sticking plaster of a solution that lasts only until the next better offer.  It does not resolve the worst attrition rates many have seen in our lifetimes – and it never will while you make the cost to change so low.

Stand for something to believe in to earn loyalty beyond the paycheck

To prove worthy of loyalty beyond the paycheck, you must set out a purpose that partners and employees can believe in. Fail to deliver on that purpose and your rivals will scoop up your best talent with nothing more than a bag of gold and flexible working.

Nine in 10 leaders realize the need to reposition their organization to unleash people in the post-Covid world (with 50% boosting talent development spend, and 48% retraining managers and leaders (source, HFS Research, 2021, sample 400 Global 2000 enterprises). Just as critical is the realization that in OneEcosystem, the impact we make reaches way beyond the boundaries of our own organization. In 2021 HFS Research found that among 158 C-level executives in Global 2000 enterprises, 9 out of 10 predicted ecosystems would be even more critical in the post-COVID-19 world.

Establishing a purpose will prove the difference between success and failure in the emerging HFS OneEcosystem. Here success relies on businesses building long-term relationships of trust and mutual benefit in networks of stakeholders.

Purpose attracts customers and builds stakeholder networks of trust

Purpose is just as important in attracting and retaining customers. Accenture found 62% of consumers want companies to take a stand on issues that they are passionate about, (Source: Accenture).

Fortune found 64% of consumers say a company’s primary purpose should be to make the world a better place (Fortune, 2019). Not only does doing the right thing attract consumers, employees, and partners, it also convinces them to put their money where their hearts are. US consumers are more likely to be loyal (83%) to brands that lead with purpose. And 72% say they feel it is more important than ever to buy from companies that reflect their values. (Cone/Porter Novelli 2019)

Grow talent pools, and your market – by standing up to tackle inequality

Purpose isn't a mission statement on a wall, it is lived through actions. You must act now to demonstrate what matters to you. Because the pandemic has exposed the deepening ravine between rich and poor, taking action to tackle inequality has become a prime purpose target with which to attract employees, customers, and partners.

Of course, stakeholders want more than just your alignment with them on inequality.  Sustainability, inclusion, diversity, and philanthropy all matter just as much. So think of this as a start. And since Inequality limits access to education and therefore the size of the talent pool you can draw on – as well as constraining market size, it would seem a worthy win-win place from which to start.

Brutal inequality got worse during the pandemic

The pandemic has thrown the reality of brutal inequality into sharp relief. During the first two years of the pandemic, Charity Oxfam found (January 2022) that the world’s ten richest men (note, all men) more than doubled their nest eggs from $700 billion to $1.5 trillion. Between them, they have six times more than the poorest 3.1 billion people have between them (the global population is currently estimated at 7.9 billion).

In 2020, CEOs of the top 350 firms in the U.S. made $24.2 million, on average. They earn a ratio of 351:1 versus a typical worker. In 1965 that figure was 20:1. This isn’t just a problem of Jeff and Elon’s making. You get to own it, too.

Crazy, and rising pay gaps are not the only route to success

Does it have to be this way to build a successful company? U.S. credit card processing services company Gravity Payments shows there is another path. It raised the company minimum salary to $70k for all 120 employees in 2015 – including the CEO. It has almost doubled in size since, with 90% employee retention.

And when revenues fell 50% almost overnight in the early part of the Covid crisis, staff volunteered to take a pay cut to keep the business afloat. By July 2020 the company was back on an even keel. And boss Dan Price paid back everyone who had sacrificed part of their pay in the interim.

Inequality kills someone every four seconds – and locks out millions more from opportunity, and out of our demand-ravaged talent pools

Disposable income (or its obvious lack) makes a real difference when facing the ravages of inflation. UK average energy bills are going up 54% (BBC, February 3, 2022), food bills are soaring more than 10% (so far). Now food banks are an alarmingly normalized part of day-to-day life for many with 700,000 families using them in 2020 alone (source, The Trussell Trust).

Globally the impact of inequality is real, and it is harsh – particularly among the poorest 3.1 billion. Oxfam says (in its report, Inequality Kills) that while a new billionaire was created every 26 hours since the start of the pandemic, one person every four seconds dies as a result of inequality – lack of access to healthcare, hunger, gender-based violence, and climate breakdown. Many millions more are shut out of opportunities – limiting the talent pool just as the world’s economic recovery faces growth-crippling skills shortages.

Bottom Line: Start to set things right with measures and rewards that prove you care, to reap the benefit of the networks of trust your purpose attracts

Leaders must now make a stand, demonstrating what they and their company stand for, through their actions and through how their performance is both measured and rewarded.

We have to stop rewarding pure bottom-line outcomes as if they come guilt-free. Instead identify measures that better reflect our business’s role in creating a safe and just space for humanity. In doing so you will show the world the purpose you prioritize, attracting those customers, employees, and partners who will form the networks of trust your success in HFS OneEcosystem depends on.

Start with what you can control. To reduce basic wealth inequality within your organization take a lead from the UN Sustainable Development Goals. These suggest that by 2030 income growth of the bottom 40% of the population should be at a higher rate than the ‘national’ average. Substitute ‘company’ for national and make a start today.

Usage beats technical capabiliity - every time

When the internet first emerged it was damned hard to use. Creating, posting and distributing content - it was all do-able. But you needed the time, patience and inclination to work out how.

Then (eg) Facebook came along. The internet with training wheels on. Anyone could play. 2.8bn users later - everyone is a publisher now.

We need the Facebook moment for application and workflow development. Yes, a plethora of no-code/low-code drag-and-drop solutions promise much. But most are no more user-friendly than a typical Wordpress blog.

Low-code/No code has been with us for a long time now. Yet no vendor has delivered the UX to match the experience of a Facebook.

Imagine how rapidly a solution could scale through an enterprise if it enabled everyone to build apps and workflows as effectively as the social software experience enables everyone to publish.

Usage beats technical capability every time.

If you're wondering why it's been a bit quiet on here...

 I'm working at HFS Research - and writing plenty over there.

Come take a look.

Be kind to India. It's crisis is deeper than it looks

The nature of today's global supply webs and our distributed ways of working mean many, if not all of us have colleagues in the midst of crisis in India right now.

Yes, we have all had our burdens from Covid-19. But I fear India's is way deeper than most - and provides a warning of what still may come to others if we do not come together to vaccinate the globe.

India has been setting record, after unenviable record, for the highest number of cases. The Indian health ministry reported almost 353,000 new cases and 2,812 deaths on Monday (April 26).

For comparison the UK peaked at around 60,000 new cases a day - with around 1800 lives lost per day.

Yes, India is a 'younger' country - and this may account for a substantial reduction in the per capita total deaths. But the UK health service - though stretched to its absolute limits - did cope. There was no shortage of ventilators, beds, treatment or oxygen as we are witnessing in India.

IF, India's deaths per capita is broadly the same as the UK experience, I fear deaths due to Covid may realistically be peaking at in the order 10-11,000 per day.

We can but hope that the authorities get to grips with the actual numbers, get serious about lockdowns and go military scale on vaccine roll-out, or things will only get worse.

in the meantime, all of us with colleagues, friends or family in India need to care for each other, accept delays and late deliverables with good grace, and understand the anxiety and grief of others.

It's harder to be kind than it is to be clever (as Jeff Bezos is quoted as saying... I'll be kind and let him have that (but you may also want to reference some Buddhist texts).

Leadership in an age of abundance

Automation transforms the priorities - and therefore the skills required of - the leaders in a new age of abundance.

By offering limitless low-cost labour it provides:

1. Immediate abundance of capacity.

2. Learned abundance of capability.

Before the opportunity to automate - particularly the opportunity to engage ML/AI-infused automation - successful management was all about control and direction of constrained and relatively fixed capacities and capabilities. These primarily existed in the employee cohort.

Over time this extended to out-sourced cohorts which offered a little more flexibility - but essentially capability and capacity resided in the people you directly or indirectly employed.

The scarcity of labour made the wise and timely allocation of it an essential business skill. That created an entire industry of strategic planning, roadmaps, business case development. HR and logistics to identify the need for new capacities and capabilities and scale up (and down) accordingly.

Pre-digital it was ok to have five-year plans. Digital typically thrust an annual cycle on leaders; the combined effect of the cloud and of globalization has already been to rapidly close any gap a 'strategy' may initially provide by way of competitive advantage.

With automation, there is no cycle. Leaders can summon up or switch off entire new swathes of digital workforces in seconds. Enabling this friction-free recruitment and redundancy through the cloud and appropriate pricing models is the near-term competitive battlefield for automation vendors.

And it closes the enablement gap between strategy and execution in ways 20th century leaders could only dream of.

But it also threatens some fundamental relationships between the organization and work. How many times have we heard leaders proclaim 'people are our greatest asset'. Now our leaders command a digital workforce - to both do the grunt work and augment the decision-making and creative delivery of their human teams.

Today's leader must become skilled in directing an automated workforce to deliver on decisions made by a human workforce, augmented and amplified by their digital peers.

Their choices are less about how many people they direct to to do what, and more about carving out the differentiation that informs what data they seek, where from and how it is interpreted for insight.

With so much data available to understand needs and wants, so many systems available to listen-learn-respond to those needs and understand customer contexts, and such limitless low-cost labour to deliver vs those needs in more and more customised configurations, business process operations will be honed  in ever-improving, self-learning and natively automated iterative cycles.

Recognising and assembling the technologies to do this (as described by the OneOffice Emerging TechPlatform) at least places the enterprise on a level playing field with all the others that are smart enough and fast enough to recognise how digital transformation gets out of a strategists head and into the systems of the organisation.

Make no mistake, first-mover does offer an advantage here. The first to set their systems of learning rolling will accelerate their self-improving processes, and get faster and better at doing so - opening a gap that laggards will find hard to close.

But it is in the will to break down silos, in the quality and systemization of change, the emphasis on scaling their organisational digital fluency, and in the selection of a domain to extend expertise in, that competitive differentiation will emerge.

These then are the areas in which tomorrow's leaders must accelerate their skills. Not all come naturally. Selecting the domain comes down to legacy purpose or establishing one. This is where vision and belief come together to encompass both goals and ways of working to attract employees, partners, and customers and to inform and be reflected by the algorithms of the business - as much part of your brand as anything.

This will require a step-change in the embrace of data and insight for decision making, driving process and supporting the employee and customer experience.

Tomorrow's C-suite must be skilled and able to coach their intelligent automation processes to assist and complement their expertise - just as much as they coach their human reports to better support them in the future.

They must learn to trust in, and act on, the new opportunities their systems of anticipatory insight present them. They must accept that much of judgment now resides in backing the real-time data - ready to press the go-button on instant new divisions of digital labour to take advantage.

For some, the trust will only come when they understand and believe in the decisions embedded in the processes that deliver that data. They have to go on their journeys of discovery right now. Because before long we will stop talking about lucky generals and ballsy decisions.

The complete leader will be an insight-led pragmatic decision-maker, combining a scientific approach to data with the emotional intelligence, imagination and empathy to guide both people and bots towards an intended future in which the shared values and concerns of the humans engaged are brightly and clearly reflected.

Photo by Raphael Rychetsky on Unsplash

Quantum Organisations: In superposition until data observations make them manifest

The quantum organisation is emerging as the engine of value generation in a world of uncertainty.

This is an organisation in superpostion until the moment data observation provides the insight for it to converge on its future state.

Already binary choices - such as business or IT - are being consigned to the history books. Super-positions of yes and no, 1 and 0, in multiple array create a quantum organisation designed to exist in multiple future possible states.

To achieve this the quantum organisation sets its purpose-led parameters and designs to:

• Listen: Through data discovery-and-capture processes which are natively automated for continuous improvement.
• Learn: Derive insight from the data with which to calculate the possibility of all viable and Purpose-aligned future states, improving accuracy through cycles of automated and iterative learning. The best fit are the future value opportunities with which the quantum organisation manifests its best-bet future state.
• Respond: Meet the needs of the best-fit future state we choose, at speed and with accuracy, through the application of end-to-end intelligent, self-improving, iterative, automated human-enhancing processes of delivery decision-making.

To meet the needs of people, partners, planet and profit, all iterative processes described above should be both informed and constrained by relevant and fresh data representing each enabling part of the ecosystem.

Of course, in this way only one, extremely effective, version of the organisation is actually brought into existence at any one time (at least in our universe...). What I seek to emphasise with this quantum organisation idea, is the importance of maintaining the routes to all-possible viable futures (constrained within each organisations' parameters) as effectively as possible - given the range of unknown unknowns currently in play and likely to be for rest of this decade.

In these circumstances of ambiguity, the only big bet to make is on systems enabling organisational superposition and on the processes that enable Listen-Learn-Respond toward the future value opportunities you converge and manifest in.

The supporting Emerging Tech Platform for exactly this is rapidly assembling with Native Automation, People & Process and Data & Insights the agents of change. The mindset - the unifying vision of what it is to be genuinely digitally transformed to this new future-value creating state is already with us.

At HFS Research we call it OneOffice. 

Photo by mary rabbit on Unsplash

Covid19 is a warning about a divided but global world. We must change

I hate to burst bubbles - but Covid19 is NOT our 100-year pandemic. The 'Spanish Flu' of 1918 took approximately 5% of the global population. If Covid19 were to do the same we would be looking at 3 million dead in the UK alone. Not even worst-case left-to-its-own devices calculations would put Covid19 into that league. Most estimates suggest 400,000-600,000 without treatment, restrictions or vaccine.

Covid19 appears to kill between 0.5 and 1 per cent of those infected (source, FullFact). In this circumstance we must learn smart lessons from Covid19 - as our best preparation of the 100-year pandemic which may be yet to come - with an order or magnitude greater threat to life.

The good news is, humanity is a quick study. When we understand the causes we do change. We must change.

There are a world of breath-holders who remain hopeful that we will be going 'back to normal'. First by last Easter, now by next... or then again perhaps October. The reality is we will never go back to normal. Not if we are smart. I know you have heard this many times, but let's put some meaty evidence from history on to this particular bone.

Behaviour changes as a result of epidemics and pandemics. 

Europe's Black Death killed many millions. But it's long term effect was to change the way society was organised. Too little labour to work the fields led to the emergence of regular pay for farm workers and an increase in wages for artisans and peasants, impacting what had been a rigidly stratified society. No coincidence that the story of Dick Whittington's rise from poverty to Lord Mayor of London arises at that time.

Cholera and associated waves of disease that followed industrialisation and urbanisation led to entirely new sanitation methods. Where once it was normal to sling faeces out of your bedroom window, we learned to embrace a new future-facing normal rather than go back to all that...

The following - from an interview in the New Yorker with Professor Frank M Snowden about his book Epidemics And Society - makes the point that the way we organise and live is key to the epidemics we endure.

"Disease outbreaks have shaped politics, crushed revolutions, and entrenched racial and economic discrimination. Epidemics have also altered the societies they have spread through, affecting personal relationships, the work of artists and intellectuals, and the man-made and natural environments. 

“Epidemic diseases are not random events that afflict societies capriciously and without warning...On the contrary, every society produces its own specific vulnerabilities. To study them is to understand that society’s structure, its standard of living, and its political priorities.”

The lesson for us is clear. Our latest pandemic comes to us by virtue of the way we have organised our massively interconnected, yet deeply economically and socially divided world. 

"we need, as human beings, to realize that we’re all in this together, that what affects one person anywhere affects everyone everywhere, that we are therefore inevitably part of a species, and we need to think in that way rather than about divisions of race and ethnicity, economic status, and all the rest of it."

We need to learn fast. We don't have another 100 years. 

Time for tech to step up with a single truth view

Fake News needs stamping out. It's undermining democracies and right now it's costing lives.

Every time a Covid denier or anti-vaxxer spreads their evidence-empty theories they risk not only many lives, but - no doubt unwittingly - they also support an insidious racism. 

Ask yourself - who would want to target the South Asian Muslim community with the bullshit about pork and alcohol products in the vaccines? Who benefits from creating extra risk of Covid death in a community already over-represented in the list of victims?

Just as we all have a role to play in preventing the spread of the virus, so we all have a role to play in preventing the spread of fake news. So crank up your crap filters. Challenge with facts or just block and walk away (don't feed the troll...)

But we could use some help in this. We have the tech to be much smarter in our response to fake news - and more scalable.

Through data validation and verification - and the application of AI and ML to unstructured data, we have made great leaps in personal identity. Customer Data Platforms enable clear sight of the individual - where-ever you tread digitally - whether that be web, mobile, voice and increasingly in the digitally augmented real world. It's why when (potentially) Alexa listens, Facebook targets you with an ad.

We call it the Single Customer View - aka the one version of the truth. Once established as a kernel it is built upon with each new data discovery - person A is - called X, lives at Y, eats at Z. These remain true until updated - always back to that single person A as the kernel.

Given the alarming and real challenge of Fake News, it's time the same tech guns were turned on fact, rapidly evaluating the source of the kernel of the fact, ranking it for quality and quantity of source to provide an early estimate of accuracy - and then built upon with a network of validation. Posts could be red / amber /green flagged in real time.

Imagine the frustration of the anti-vaxxer whose links to sources are instantly red-flagged for reputation? That might wake them up, too.

Yes, I know, there are questions about whose version of the truth we test by. Google already offers more weight to links it trusts. The BBC already decides what stories it will broadcast and how it will tell them. Our access to 'truth' IS already edited.

The web was meant to be a way that truth could always find a way - overcoming state control or media mediation. But the last few years have taught us that our mass congregation in social networks makes (some, too many of) us vulnerable to influence and control by bad actors.

Those bad actors exploit human vulnerabilities (and build bots to do the same). Now good actors must step up and rebalance - subjecting lies to scrutiny and giving those susceptible to believe them to the tools to alert them to the distinct possibility they are being sold a pup.

Image via UN

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