It never was all about the economy -stupid

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

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

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

Is furlough a glimpse of a bot-powered economy?

The Context Shock of Covid-19 is forcing underlying trends to the surface at unprecedented rates. We aren't experiencing anything that wasn't going to happen anyway - we are experiencing it faster.

Political economist Orit Gal points out: "complexity theory teaches us that major events are the manifestation of maturing and converging underlying trends: they reflect change that has already occurred within the system."

This means going 'back to normal' is a mistake. As is failing to become more responsive.

I have detailed two of these trends in distributed working, and the responsive organisation (and it can be argued distributed working is nested in and part of the trend towards the responsive organisation).

I have also documented the trend towards treating our planet as a partner, in the way we have become good at treating our customers with respect - in the concept of Planet Experience.

There are, naturally, others. The trend towards a cashless society, for example, away from traditional education (by subject and as a mass production model), for another.

I want to raise some questions about the acceleration of a significant and immediate additional trend today, because its second and third order consequences will have extreme impact on our economic model: Automation. 

As companies survey the challenges facing them over the next 12-18 months they will seek to cut costs both by scaling back on their office needs (distributed working) but also by automating everything they can. If any aspect of your job can be automated and the business you are working for is looking to survive, what it will spend on, is in ways of saving money. And it's undeniable that bots usually look like a short term win in this respect.

We can argue about the harm caused by the loss of smarts from carving people out of a business. The brighter organisations will use bots to lift and shift the bits of people's working lives that don't require creativity and imagination - so that that the people are free to create value by being more creative and imaginative. But that's looking on the bright side.

We are in a darkened world of raised drawbridges, of panic and protectionism. Fear will drive many, many struggling businesses to simply take the savings and worry about the consequences later.

Those consequences will include large scale unemployment. And for many people, pivoting to being an RPA expert (for example) will, realistically, be out of reach.

What this leads us to is the acceleration of a further underlying trend - perhaps towards some version of the Universal Basic Income. Covid-19 has given us an accelerated glimpse of that future through schemes such as the UK Government's Furlough policy. Touted as a job retention scheme on the assumption things get better again fast, coupled with the lock-down experience, it may prove a leading indicator of life after large scale automation. A taste of things to come.

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with bots taking peoples jobs. The challenges are in how we judge what constitutes a positive contribution to the society we live in and the ecosystem on which we rely.

If you enjoy time in the sun, exercising, learning, baking, creating art, music, craft, and in time, spending time with friends and family - doing the things you 'enjoy' more of the time than the things that are recognised as making an economic contribution (ie working), then perhaps we should formally value the enjoyable stuff as highly as we do the 'economically valuable' stuff.

But how? How do we get paid if the bots are doing our jobs? 

Stephen Hawkins last message on the web gave us a clue. He said the problem wasn't the bots, it was capitalism - at least the form of market-first capitalism dominant today. Bots are bad if they mean the economic value they create /displace comes back to fewer and fewer owners of this new means of production. Bots are fine if the value they create is more equally distributed to the benefit of both society and planet.

Taxing bots has been suggested to tackle this in the short term, with the tax raised being available to spend on positive interventions for society. Which could include a Universal Basic Income and investment in a happier, healthier society and planet.

This trend demands something important of us - our understanding of our own value, and of what we call success. We will need to start prioritising happiness over stores of wealth.

Is that all bad?



Photo by Robert Collins on Unsplash

Emap: Strategic review? Against what world view?

Emap plc is undertaking a strategic review - which roughly translates as 'is up for sale at the right price'.
As a humble employee I'm told to 'carry on - business as usual'. And, to be honest, isn't any and everything up for sale, at the right price, at any time?
Experience of friends who have been through similar strategic reviews in other companies suggest one thing: This process won't be fast. So I'm not putting my seatbelt on just yet.
Latest rumour is this was all sparked by a specific £1.3bn offer for the B2B division.

As usual, when I'm close to a story that makes the mainstream media, I'm completely underwhelmed by the standard of 'professional' reporting. No wonder mainstream broadcast media is characterised as struggling! (and I write as a professionally trained journalist of some 20 years experience).
Take for example the Mail on Saturday's report on emap's Friday announcement. It said emap had done a u-turn only months after claiming the numbers didn't stack up for a sale or demerger. And our expert financial guide in the report thrilled us with the insight that the change in mind was as a result of the share price hitting £8.65.
But, as any semi-sentient would have been able to tell the writer, the share price rose to that level as a result of the announcement on Friday morning. Basic cause and effect. Basic point missed.
No wonder people now turn to each other to create trust. A handful of partially informed non-experts would have spotted that simple error. A co-created version of the story is already ahead on points!
And the moment a report makes a simple mistake like that one - that's the moment I lose faith. Why trust the hotch-potch of suggested buyers tagged on?
A digital communal version of that would have that simple notion revealed- and corrected in moments, faith restored - sensible discourse continued.
No surprise then that NowPublic has just secured another $10.6M of funding.

The Sunday's were little more enlightening (those I saw, anyway, please do share if you found someone who had a sensible view writing somewhere).
One argued that major emap shareholders were getting jittery over emap's lack of a decent digital strategy.
Without context there is no meaning - so to say emap lacks a decent digital strategy means little unless you're going to compare it with what (for example) other traditional mainstream media companies have done or have revealed they are doing.
Off the top of my head - emap has one - is investing heavily in one - and is growing its digital revenues. How does that compare with traditional media rivals? I'll leave that to the time-rich Sunday print journalists to consider.

A strategic review responds only to the stakeholder with the most political power in a system: The City.
The City is conservative in its thought. If it can be characterised in systems terms, it is a hard systems thinker.
To be an effective company in a time of change means operating at the creative edge of chaos. It means having a paradigm shift in world view. It means soft systems thinking.
None of these sit well with the view from the single most powerful stakeholder.
But if The City is genuinely interested in growth, as opposed to comfortable mediocrity, it has to change its world view.
The City wants to see us honing our scissor kick technique in order to keep raising the high jump bar. It's the only way it understands change.
We have to do a fosbury flop. It can't even guess at how that might work.

Make no mistake, the world is changed. Your world view must change with it. A number of key stakeholders will always have an important role in influencing how well any system adapts to that change. Their world view must change too.
It's up to us to make that happen.