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

Publishers should abandon both paid content AND advertising to survive

I'm glad that some Murdoch publications are going back to the failed experiment of paywalls - if only because it will reveal once and for all how far from right they've got their strategy for the networked world.

I understand completely why they are doing it - they've done the math (I've been through it with similar orgs). With only small audiences who pay they can make more money than with vast audiences who don't.

That's because those who advertise online don't pay as much as those who advertise in more traditional mediums. There has been a race to the bottom on advertising pricing which made certain of that.

Mass media publishers have learned that they can't make as much money in the networked world (where everyone is publisher, distributor and creator of their own user journey/experience) as they did in the world of control. So, they are attempting to go back to the world of control (when that genie is well and truly out of the bottle and showing no signs of wanting to return to it).

Information is free. But the way it is packaged - the experience of it - you can add a price to. Music, for example is commoditised. People don't pay Apple for music at iTunes. They pay for the packaging, the user experience, ease of usefulness. If this is what the TimesOnline etc will deliver for news content, they may have a business case. I struggle to imagine the parallel myself.

And if all they are going to do is offer access to information in the way they have done until now - but behind a paywall - then they will lose. They can only ever offer access to limited information with limited sources and processes of verification (and trust creation). The rest of the open web is unlimited in both these key respects. Open wins.

But I think through all this publishers are avoiding the key questions. Why do people pay less to advertise online than they did in traditional media? Online the Times et al can acquire greater audiences, more eyeballs. Why isn't that of higher value than print to those taking the broadcast approach to advertising? More eyeballs = pay me more - surely? Why is an online 'eyeball' worth less than an offline one?

Is it that the many digital innovations in advertising that the internet has enabled has lifted the wool from many eyes? It has shown that an eyeball doesn't equal a sale. Never did. But when you are able to measure the lack of transaction, the lack of interest, the scale of your interruptive spam - as the internet has enabled like no other medium - then the wastage of 'Advertising' becomes ever more clear.

Yet publishers persist with pay-for-my-content/pay-for-adverts-on-my-content as their only experiment - as if the solution can only be one or other, or both. Perhaps it's time for them to try a new experiment rather than repeat a failed one? Perhaps it's time to try not one, or other, or both... but neither.

How can publishers create value if they do not charge for content and do not take adverts?

Micro-contributions? Nah - that's just paying for content by novel means (as was Radiohead's pay what you like for our album) Sponsorship? Nah - that's just placing adverts on my content, by another name. Affiliate deals - just another digital ad innovation.

What can they do? Start with the Because Effect. Don't try to make money with content, try to make it because of it.

Content can be the social object around which communities of purpose form - co-creating communities ready and willing to wikifix solutions with brands and organisations - instead of having them imposed on them and fed to them through advertising.

Publishers can become platform organisations: platforms for creating outcomes with genuine ROI rather than platforms for pumping out things people may find useful attached to ads for things they rarely do.

Pay for content/Place ads on content, worked in a world of mass production and distribution - of mass media. But a new 'neither' model is required in a world of niche, of communities of purpose, of active rather than passive consumers - in a networked world.

Platform could be it.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Mark McLaughlin: Audiences Don't Pay for Content (huffingtonpost.com)
• 2 Murdoch Papers in U.K. to Charge for Web Use (nytimes.com)
• Times editor: 'We are going to lose a lot of passing traffic' (guardian.co.uk)
• Creating the Future of Media: 4 Driving Forces, 4 Strategic Issues, 4 Essential Capabilities (myventurepad.com)

It'll be a sad day when we finally understand influence

A fascinating post by fellow 90:10er Stowe Boyd (... The Dark Matter of influence) has been rolling around my head since I read it yesterday.

Stowe discusses this Arvix Post, titled Best Connected Individuals Are Not the Most Influential Spreaders in Social Networks.

To summarise; influence is derived from how close you are to other influencers in a network - how low and short the number of links from you to how many other influencers (not the number of your connections, as often assumed).

Which validates why network analysis is such a crucial element when trying to 'identify influencers'. (image via Beth Harte)

Stowe concludes:

The subtle, dark-matter mystery of social networks is that influence is oblique, and not easily determined by the sorts of tools we have today.
It is not your follower count, or who you follow, per se. But, instead, do you have short paths into other social scenes, both incoming and outgoing? That is the deep structure of being truly connected: bridging over different social scenes, acting as a conduit, a vector, a filter and amplifier for ideas good and bad, the best insights, and deadly viruses.

Influence is fluid. It resides less in the node and more in the interactions between the nodes. It is the interactions which change the state of the group, not a change in the condition of the nodes (think water H2O molecules and ice, water, steam - an example Mark Earls (another 90:10 collaborator) refers to in his book Herd. (Update, Mark has now posted his own response)

This means that giving interesting things to people to do together - bringing them together around things they care about (through shared purpose), to act on those things, has more value than spotting the influencer and giving them some sort of message you expect them to go off and influence others with.

Influence has a certain value: in crisis management, identifying those with the likelihood of having their voice heard by a greater number and in giving likely start points for the real job of peer to peer distribution. If you're going to try to turn the flock, you're bound to think it best to start off by working with the big birds.

And to Stowe's point about the tools, influence is complex, but not complicated. It can be deconstructed nuance by nuance; function by function.

One day - and perhaps quite soon - we will have the tools to fully understand it in real time. And that concerns me. Because at the point we can truly understand influence we're but a tiny step from using that power for ill. Manipulation, springs to mind. It could all become very 'broadcast'.

People influence each other. They change the state they are in. Help them find each other, support their conversation, help them act on it. That will always generate more value (for ALL parties) than an influential voice.

Be the platform.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Blog - Best Connected Individuals Are Not The Most Influential Spreaders in Social Networks (technologyreview.com)
• Matrix: Companies Should Factor Social Influence in Total Customer Lifetime Value (web-strategist.com)
• Stowe Boyd backs inaugural Social Business Innovation Awards (fasterfuture.blogspot.com)
• Joining 90:10 (stoweboyd.com)
• Taking Social Business on the Road (socialmediatoday.com)
• It's Not About Influence - It's About Trust (myventurepad.com)
• The Things You Learn About People (myventurepad.com)
• Influence, the influentials and the influenced (herd.typepad.com)

You the channel

Microsoft Research was kind enough to invite Bauer Consumer Media (the company I work for) behind the doors of its Cambridge (UK) facility today.
I was joined by our Head of Technology Gus Swan and, along for the fun of it, Communities Dominate Brands' Alan Moore.
My very sincere thanks to Natasa Milic-Frayling for putting together a sparkling agenda and group of brilliant people which sparked some fascinating conversation.
Microsoft Research is the blue sky arm - where new stuff gets toyed with - often ideas that are years from being turned into a product, if they'll ever see the light of day.
And for that reason I'm not going to repeat the bulk of what we were shown.
However, one thing Natasa demo'd is in the public domain and I think it's very interesting indeed: WeConnect.co.uk.

Early in the afternoon we discussed Reed's Law (Group Forming Network Theory) and the idea that navigation and real-time discovery of people who share the same purpose is the thing that unlocks the potential of Reed's Law.

The problem that needs solving is: how do I find people who want to achieve the same as I do right now?

One limitation to overcome (and a pretty significant one at that) is the fact that the tools which enable this kind of connection, social networks, even social mediums like twitter, are still, no matter what their scale, silos.

The long term and monumental win is in a platform-agnostic solution. It is where we are the platforms. We, the nodes, connect through the internet as a whole, not a small subsection of it.

Which is why I find WeConnect.co.uk so interesting.

At this stage it's a series of platform-agnostic personal broadcast channels. I take a picture in Venice - I can share it with you on your mobile, or to my online picture gallery, or directly to your desktop; one-too-one or one-to-many. The connections are between us (via Internet Explorer in this case). The device we use simply realises that connection. There is no social network or medium involved.

Natasa and co are thinking about adding some of the kind of commenting we come to expect of social networks, but know that this will also bring complex design issues.

As it stands it's a brave first step.

Imagine an internet in which there are only blogs and those blogs exist nowhere other than at the point at which they are realised, or rendered, on a device. Imagine a place without platforms or silos, instead a place where groups attract through the implicit and explicit data each of these blogs exhibit. In real time. To and from any enabled device.

(nb, these are my imaginings, not those of microsoft, at least not on this occasion!)

A few steps to go then, but I like the direction WeConnect points.

Has media forgotten what it does?

It goes without saying (but I'm going to say it anyway) that paper has had a huge influence on the way print media developed. But I wonder if we take for granted the huge influence the medium we have grown up with has had on how we are viewing our digital future?

Paper is finite.

That simple fact leads to a number of outcomes. For example; there is a cost involved in adding extra pages to a publication. Paper constrains how much we can publish and therefore what we choose to publish. Paper demands that we are selective - that we edit. We filter the world's information and publish only that which we see fit. And then we make it fit, the way we see fit.

We filter on the way in.

We place ourselves in a self-selecting position of authority. It's a seat we find hard to give up.

We do this, of course, from a perspective of 'serving the needs of the consumer'. We aim to give them what they want. It is in our financial interests so to do.

But the needs of the consumer have to fight for resources with the demands imposed by the medium. And the medium tends to win.

Paper has mass.

This creates distribution challenges. We have to move this mass from one place to another (driven by an initial transcation). We do our best to distribute it to distribution hubs (we call them shops) where we hope the supply chain can be completed with another transaction (which puts them in the hands of the consumer.

These facts (paper is finite and has mass) mean we are forced to serve consumers as large, lowest-common-denominator-driven groups. Paper's physical nature imposes a structural limitation on what print media does and how it must treat its users.

It is conceivably possible that each consumer could have a magazine crafted precisely for themselves, to meet their precise needs. All it would take is a dedicated team of content producers (and in the print world this means employing a team of writers, photographers, designers and sub-editors), a one-off print run and a delivery direct to the lucky receipient's door.

There is nothing standing in the way of that. Nothing but cost.

If you're prepared to pay multiple thousands for each issue of your magazine you can have what the digital space can give you right now (where you'd get it for free). It'll just take a while to deliver.

Print never felt there was much of a market for that. So it created content aimed toward the lowest common denominator (granted, niche by niche on occasion).

It distributed to reach as many as possible with as little waste as possible - but still found 20-25% of its output pulped. The need to drive down unit cost make us err towards a mass production approach. It forces us to think locally, too. (Distributing a newspaper globally is something of a challenge precisely because of that mass and cost thing.)

Consider then how digital is different.

Digital space is infinite. There is zero cost attached in adding an extra page. There is therefore no need to filter on the way in. There is therefore no reason for us to be selective, no cause for us to take up our seat upon our self-appointed editorial throne. The user gets to filter on the way out.

Digital has no mass. There are zero costs to distribution. We don't need supply chains or distribution hubs in the physical sense. Distribution can be pulled to those who want it, distributed by those who advocate it. And it can happen everywhere right now.

Now you can have your ultra personalised content at zero cost - and you can have it this very instant, updated the moment relevant change occurs. It's unlikey you'll do this alone, because you are a human being and hard-wired to be social.

When we think of the role of media in the digital world, are we considering what is equivalent to newspapers and magazines (that is media properties) in digital form - or do we want to become the paper (the medium)?

Is the platform approach (and it's one I advocate myself) about trying to be the digital equivalent of paper? Bearing in mind digital 'paper' has no mass and is limitless, would we be better off delivering brilliantly creative media properties closer in form to user accounts than to social networks?

My initial thoughts are that we may may have multiple roles - as nuancers of the culture (helping with collaborative filtering) in a platform/aggregational style AND as brilliant media properties (of the user account kind) where we become part of the conversation, pulled into someone else's aggregator or platform.

Who says it has to be either/or? The digital world offers more dimensions than we've had to consider before.

Please contribute your thoughts by commenting below.

An updated definition of media brands

Drawing a few threads together I'm proposing an updated definition of what a media brand is - and offering a suggestion about what a media brand should do:

• A media brand is a platform for a community with shared interests.
• Focused on the interests of this community, we should aggregate content and offer services.
• Services are best delivered at the point they are needed – and that is always, always mobile!

Note the reference to the 'aggregation' of content, rather than the 'creation of'. I'm not suggesting media companies should not bother with the creation of content. I am suggesting it's no longer our primary function.

Our legacy of content creation can get in the way of putting the community first. We can't resist the urge to broadcast - to select what the audience is offered and spin it to our tastes.

This often reveals itself in the way we display content. Media brands put the content they create first, tip their hats at some user-generated content (always given second billing) and actively prevent the sharing of other sources of content the community might actually prefer.

A blank sheet of paper approach would open our eyes to simple facts such as:

• The best content for the community is welcome - be it our own, rival media brand owners', or user generated content.
• The community should judge what content gets highest prominence - and which gets booted into touch.
• Groups should be allowed to form which set their own parameters for what equals interesting and 'good'.
  

This requires some bravery on the part of the media brand owner. It means that only if our own content is good enough/a good enough fit with the community will it score the highest ratings and get top billing.

What lessons are there in this that you aren't prepared to learn?

l