The technology storm that threatens to blow Trump's promises away

Image via NYTimes.com

President Elect Donald J Trump (which is something I never imagined having to type) faces the Brexit problem. How to deliver on all the Make America Great, on-the-hoof, populist claims he made to secure the votes of a majority.

He has promised. Now he must deliver.

His problem is that he has made promises to the 'forgotten' those manually skilled, rarely college-educated, family and God loving folk who jobs have come under significant pressure from vast global economic forces which, frankly, are beyond his control.

Even if they were, he would be facing up to an even bigger challenge right now,

Consider for a moment some of the biggest technology trends reshaping our world ;

Next Generation Batteries; Most of the batteries you use apply the same principles as were discovered for making electricity hundreds (if not thousands) of years ago. New power sources will make intelligent devices more self sufficient, give commercial and long-distance reality to electric cars and transform how we consume power (with all that entails for the supply chain of fossil fuels).

They deliver high enough capacity to serve whole factories, or towns. Based on sodium, aluminium or zinc. They avoid the heavy metals and caustic chemicals used in older lead-acid designs, are cheaper, more scalable, and safer than the lithium batteries currently used.

Critically for the energy workers in the traditional industries Donald is setting out to unforget, the new batteries are much better suited to transmissions from solar or wind power. (Hint, Donald, focus here and you don't have to pollute the planet, either)

Which takes us to Autonomous Vehicles; What are all the truck drivers, taxi drivers, bus drivers, white van drivers, Donald's driver... what are they all going to do?

An Autonomous Vehicle is really just an extension of the Internet of Things. My guess is Google will do a better job of organising the information required to get us all from A to B swiftly and safely than we can individually. Choose surge pricing and perhaps you get their faster. Emergency services would get right of way and ignorant drivers failing to move to one side would no longer be an issue. Accidents down (ambulance and fire and rescue drivers) less need to police the roads (police drivers); less time stuck in traffic. More time doing what you were going somewhere to do. Less stress. What's not to like?

Unless you work as a driver.(Pilots, you should worry, too).

Then we have robotics - ready to do all those manual labour jobs the lowest paid, hardest workers have to do. If you have a house robot why do you need a Mexican maid?

And if the boss has a dozen 24/7 robots to work your warehouse, why does he need you on your forklift?

Apply AI and the threat to humans in jobs spreads quickly into blue collar jobs. Even many parts of white collar roles will be threatened - there are many parts of a lawyers work or a doctors work (such as sifting case law, or looking for patterns in patient treatments and responses) which AI can happily handle - delivering results faster.

Put these parts together and why would you ever need to go to a shop (your IoT devices would tell you when they needed upgrading, identify the best price source, place the order, a robot would make it, AI and autonomous vehicles would handle the logistics and the product would be in your home both produced and delivered as efficiently as possible with real-time processes applying machine learning to both make decisions and continuously improve.

All of that was once done by humans.

Trump's challenge, if he is to make good on his promises, is to ensure those forgotten people feel part of this revolution of the abundant. That requires a rethink of value and a restructing of what schooling is.

If he really wants to Make America Great Again he should start with the greatest skills retraining programme in history and follow up with defining what national education for a world of permanent innovation looks like.

Beware the business bots

Image via: http://www.inspirefirst.com/

In the future every business will be digital.

For many that future has already arrived. You know you have arrived in that future when 50.1% or more of your revenue comes via digital. You can probably draw a line on your revenue growth and decline charts to identify the point at which that becomes true for you.

In the future every business will be a technology company. Being digitally, socially connected, always on via the cloud and mobile will be an essential of even the most mom & pop business.

Yes those businesses which require your corporeal presence (those that will congregate in High Streets) may feel this effect later than most, but feel it they will. If I can choose to book a haircut via my mobile vs turn-up and hope, over time even the strongest habits and relationships will be challenged. You can be sure new habits and relationships will more likely be established via the technology route. Old habits die hard - but time kills even the oldest in the end.

So it would be sensible to prepare for your digital and technological future.
But in doing so never lose sight of what will make all this technology work for you - the scalable human relationships it empowers.

Without the human heart of your business - its purpose, your belief, your demonstration of your values through what you do (not what you say) you'll end up with a business which acts like a bot.

In a dark, bleak future there is a world of business bots all following each other and trying to sell to each other based on the faked behaviours each is demonstrating to each other- rather like twitter would become if all the humans left over night.

It's easy to imagine organisations sleep walking into this future - focused on getting technology to do everything for you and for your customer. Bots see and bots do but there is no meaning for them or those they interact with in what they do. Transaction after transaction without meaning.

In the bright, belief-filled future, businesses are using technology to enable and enhance rather than to mechanically do. Here humans are connecting with humans building trust through relationships in which each has the other's best interests at heart. They are partners. They are working together to achieve a shared purpose. They generate meaning.

The role of technology is to reduce the friction in each transaction - whether that be purchasing goods, connecting people with shared purpose, or sharing ideas.  Reduce the transaction cost and you reduce the cost of action.

But we must always be careful to keep the meaning in. Industrialisation took it out. We have the opportunity to rediscover it through the human connectedness the web enables. We can take advantage - or we can build bots.

There is no insight button

I really worry about the turn-key, one-size-fits-all tech and tool solutions for social media being churned out by software and SAAS vendors for baffled brands and companies right now.

For example, this from a press release I saw on Thursday January 19:

“[Brand X’s] enterprise marketing technology allows global brands and agencies to easily activate social audiences and impact consumer actions on all major social media ecosystems simultaneously.”

My  translation: With one button you can broadcast at anyone fool enough to have followed you so far. If they happen to have stayed around since you bought them, that is.

Job done then?

What worries me is that hassled execs will take the magic bullet being offered – we all like to make ‘life simplifying’ decisions. It’s very seductive to sign up for a one-stop solution because it’s easier than understanding what they really need to. It’s unlikely to be more cost-effective though.

As I wrote previously for a piece with Ninety10 Group CEOJamie Burke (note and disclosure, we co-founded that international business consultancy together.)

Business as usual wants a set of turn-key tools to make everything all right. But the future isn't about tools. It is about behaviours - understanding changes, learning from them and responding to meet those changed needs.

Business as usual wants ever-more efficient ways to exploit customers. But the most efficient way of meeting need is delivered by a shift in mind-set not in technologies; a shift that thinks of customers as your partner in producing what matters to both of you.

Business as usual wants to exploit channels to deliver messages. Click to deploy. But the future resides in better understanding why people would want to share 'your message' - getting to grips with the idea that marketing isn't done to people, it is done with people.

A tool or set of tools won't - of themselves - deliver the change you need to shift out of business as usual. And unless you take the holistic view, unless you go through the culture shift, the organisational change that is required, the tools will lead you back to square one.

As Ninety10group Head of Innovation Steffen Huck points out “There is no ‘insight’ button on any dashboard.

There is no ‘Cultural Change’ button, either.

The web: More than an enabler of rights

Vint Cerf’s assertion that the internet should not be considered a human right troubles me.

It  troubles me because it seems to be on the wrong side of fiddling with semantics – I don’t really care if the web is only an enabler (Vint’s point) – it’s such an effective, inclusive, far-reaching, all-engaging enabler that those excluded from it are as cut off from what matters to them as those cut off from air or water.

Access to clean air, clean water – these are human rights. And always have been.

But if the authorities only make that available to you in oxygen tanks in central London and bottled water at your local depot (and both at a price) you’d be right to assert that the weakness of the enabling of these rights so limits them as to make them invalid.

To argue that one can distinguish the enabling of a right from the right itself offers too many get-out clauses to those who would control from the centre.

"You're perfectly free to protest. Just not in public."

Our social connection to others – freedom of expression and assembly, are just as fundamental to our well-being as humans as other rights; to our ability to be human. The internet enables this on a species-wide scale. No other form of tech has enabled this. This is different.

To be cut off from this is different. It is to be cut off from a species-wide reassembling of the way we live that billions of others are taking advantage of. You have a right to be part of this.

And while the technology used to enable this should not matter, the reality is that it does. Indeed in the case of the Arab Spring it could be argued that the use of the ‘enabler’ (the social  tools and tech of mobile phones and social networks supported by the internet) led to the assertion of new human rights where previously they had not be allowed any form of expression. The Arab Spring is not where this ends. It is merely showing which way the wind is blowing - to a self-organised future in which participation is everything.


There is little point in saying we all have the right to participate and then expecting some to do this by sending a letter in the post.

When authorities attempt to control the enabler that the web is, they are actually restricting the right. They know this. It is why they do it.

Let’s not give them any wriggle room.

Related articles

• Vint Cerf: Internet Access Is Not a Human Right (nytimes.com)
• Father of the Internet: The Internet Isn't a Human Right [Internet] (gizmodo.com)

12 years left to adapt or die

Disruptive technologies generally take 20 years to make their broad society-wide impact felt.
The first commercially available mobile phone network opened in Japan in 1979. 20 years later everyone and their mother had a mobile phone.

in 1900 London the horse was still king of the road. 20 years later the motor car had become ubiquitous.

Social networks - and the technologies of social media, have only really been with us in user friendly form since around 2003. I pick that since that was the year MySpace was founded. (Image courtesy PetruzzoPhoto)

Yes there were social technologies before MySpace - just as there were cars before 1900 and mobile phones before 1979. But in all three cases using them (be it social technologies, cars or huge cellphones) was relatively cumbersome and/or time consuming, complex and expensive. MySpace made the peer to peer connectivity of the internet something everyone could do. On a global scale. Easily.

And by 2008 it was pretty well on the way to making the concept of social networking ubiquitous. Facebook built on that. And today as the race for 1bn users advances at a high rate of knots, it's hard to avoid the impact of this user-friendly driver of self organisation - whether it be for customer complaints or armed insurrection.

The ease with which groups of purpose can organise in social networks is something that wasn't so easily enabled on forums and in newsgroups of emails. And not as many (and perhaps not enough) people understood or were driven to understand what they could do with the web - until the nice easy interface of the social network showed the way.

When new tools become truly ubiquitous then, and only then does their full impact on society become clear. In this case I'm suggesting the new tool wasn't simply the internet, it has been the refinement of social networks to the point at which they are delivering self-organising groups of purpose on a global scale.

The process of using social networks has educated a new and huge generation in the value of real-time synchronous communication which is the guts of the formation of communities of purpose.

The future is not digital - it is self organised. That is what social networks reveal.

Everywhere this process touches it disrupts. The media industry lays witness. Others will, of course, follow. Most dramatically throughout the Arab world currently, the disruption is to centralised control. Every where there is centralised control, every where there is mediation - so adhoc self-forming communities of purpose have the power to disrupt.

Given the standard 20-year life cycle of a technological revolution, and my assertion that 2003 is the year zero for this revolution, then we can expect the complete impact to have been wrought by 2023.

In two years time we will be half way through. Half way.

The old ways have 12 years to transform or die.

Related articles

• 5 Failed Social Networks Even Worse Than MySpace (huffingtonpost.com)
• MySpace for sale, News Corp has given up (downloadsquad.switched.com)

We want more than incrementally better messages

There's a rule about new technologies - bleeding edge tech doesn't equal bleeding edge demand. I'm old enough to remember Betamax.

Electronics companies have a track record in this kind of failure. Famously (and quoted in Blue Ocean Strategy) Phillips CD-i was a commercial flop because it tried to do too many things - and customers weren't sure what value it could add to their lives.

That and the fact the games were rubbish.

Phillips added and added technical functions and spec. With all this 'special stuff' - the execs were convinced the market would lap it up. But they forgot to ask what the user would find useful.

Innovation is only any good if it's useful to people. The more people it is useful to, the better the outcome.

Often the focus of innovation is on ourselves - how can we make things better for us. Or it's on showing off how technically clever we are (our spec's bigger than your spec).

And isn't that what a huge chunk of digital marketing has been all about? Sharper and sharper focus on tracking and responding to online behaviour - cleverer and cleverer tech, more and more spec?

All the better to serve the right ad at the right time with.

All the innovation focused on building a better advert.

What we're talking about here is a technological arms race in pursuit of incremental improvements in quality or relevance of messages.

Which is the answer you'd come up with if you asked advertising and marketing teams what they wanted from digital innovation.

But is it what all elements of the route to market actually WANT from the best-ever ability to connect with people that digital technologies enable?

Is a better advert what the manufacturers and service providers want from digital technology? Is it the best they can expect from our growing ability to form communities of purpose at the drop of a hat?

And is a better advert what 'consumers' want?

Oh, I know, the right information at the right time becomes really 'useful' so you could argue the more effective you are at this the more effective your 'adverts' for all parties. There is some truth in this. Ads that take this approach attain much higher click-thru rates (but all those that don't get clicked must still be counted as spam).

More importantly, this is defaulting to the belief that what we all want is better messaging.

What if that isn't true? What if what we all actually want (manufacturers and service providers -
customers, too) is improvement in quality or relevance of products and services?

More potential 'customers' for advertising would find that useful.

So the role of advertising and marketing may just be in deploying your skills and relationships to improve the quality and relevance of products and services.

How do you innovate that using digital tools? Well that's pretty much what I'll be talking about at OMEXPO in Madrid tomorrow.

Expect references to the best set of tools to bring us together (the social technologies which form the web) being wasted on gathering eyeballs - and how platform thinking can put them to their best use: innovating better and more relevant products and services.

See you there (slides will follow :-)

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Why 'innovation' fails

Image via Wikipedia

There's a reason many a CEO views an offer to 'innovate' with a mixture of fear and disdain: Somewhere approaching 9 out of 10 business innovations fail.
There are lots of reasons:

(To summarise and plagiarise the Harvard Business Review (Jan/Feb 10) and Robert H Miles' Accelerating Corporate Transformation...)

• Managers come over all conservative - what starts as a game changer ends up as a watered-down version of what it could/should have been.
• No one gets given the space to change. Your team continue to be set the same old targets and have to deliver against the same responsibilities - yet are expected to layer on the new stuff alongside that very busy day job. They default to what they regard as the 'must do' rather than the 'important to do'. Their job descriptions don't get changed.
• Then there's 'Initiative Gridlock' which loosely translates as 'what we're doing ain't good enough, but we'll keep on plugging away until we think of something better... only we never get time to think of anything better.' There's a great Einstein quote that the boardroom should keep in mind: "The definition of madness is repeating the same experiment and expecting different results."
• It's easier to repeat than to change.
• Innovation often fails in the implementation phase - because you didn't involve the people who you need on board to make it happen, in the process of shaping what it is that needs to happen.
• That leads to its own set of issues - if the guys doing the implementation don't have the change in their soul their focus is going to be reduced and their efforts and the outcome blunted.
  

So lots of stumbling blocks to overcome. No wonder an innovation has just one chance in 10 of success.
But I do think there are ways of improving your chances AND overcoming those obstacles at the same time.
The first is not to equate innovation with incremental improvement. I always think of the image of the guy doing the Fosbury Flop for the first time. Real innovation is not a little bit better. It is not a repeat of the previous experiment, but bigger.

It is revolutionary.
I think the definition of Innovation from wikipedia re Signal Processing is helpful.

"the innovation is the difference between the observed value of a variable at time t and the optimal forecast of that value based on information available prior to time t.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innovation_(signal_processing)
In other words: "How much better could this thing be?"
How much better depends on where you look from. If you look at the issue from the perspective of the same old supply chains you have always analysed, and delivering with same set of resources you've always had to play with, you are almost certain to identify how incrementally better YOU can make it. Small headroom.

But if you look at every aspect of that supply chain and imagine you have the global resource of all those who care about solving the same problem you face, then you can start to spot the revolutionary change you and the crowd can deliver TOGETHER. Big headroom.

You can either seek to innovate solutions using the resources you have at your disposal within the org, or you can seek to innovate solutions using all those resources PLUS the world outside.
I wonder how many of those failed 9/10 innovations tried to do it all on their own?

The truly innovative organisation sees itself as an connecting, enabling platform.

You can add. We can transform.

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Lessons from the mass media wars

There are those in print media - newspapers/mags etc - who cling to the idea that they can 'do a cinema'.

When TV arrived as the latest mass media many predicted the demise of cinema.

They didn't count on its:

• Ability to adapt with experience-enhancing technology (colour, stereo, Dolby, 3d etc) 
• The power of that experience being shared.
  

If I was in a media company right now I'd be looking at how what cinema did could translate to shore up my properties. To start with. (image courtesy rivalee)

And then there's the elements that kept radio in the game when first cinema and then radio rocked up:

• Convenience

• Portability

• Currency.
  

Print shares convenience and portability - but scores zip for currency against anything post radio. It's ability to enhance shared experience ain't the greatest, either (though this can be enhanced through events and digital communities, of course)..

Media properties need to adapt. And the obsession with print has to be questioned long and hard.

Those cinematic and radio survivors of the mass media wars give a guide.

Cinema uses technology to enhance shared experiences, radio is convenient, portable and current.

Combine all these and you have a proposition to take you into the age of the eighth mass media - us.

From (We are the eighth mass media)

I don't just mean that we create the content in a UGC vs Professional Content Creators kind of way. I mean WE are the distribution, the content, the 'user journey', how messages are transmitted... WE are the medium and the media carried within it.

We are the connections. We are also how the connections are made.

In the age of the eighth mass media, organisations must understand that serving multiple and ever increasing numbers of niches is the route to sustainable scale.

Those who wish to remain part of our lives must provide value to the adhoc self-forming communities of purpose our digital selves can't help but participate in.

We have already adapted. We are creating a new landscape. Are you fit for it? Are you prepared to become so? I wonder how this 'Twitter: The newspaper of tomorrow? matches up.

Clay Shirky: Is technology changing us?

Part five of my interview with Clay Shirky has the author of Here Comes Everybody answering the charge (contributed via this blog by Matt Edgar) that he may have chosen the wrong title for his book; since we were here, being social, all along.
But Clay explains why he feels the sheer scale of collaboration available in a digitally connected world changes society and us.

"I'm not a technical determinist.... it's the novelty of scale, " he says.

Clay also tackles one of the toughest silos to overcome - language.

Watch the video below. See Clay speak. Buy his book.



The four previous parts of this (in total) 35-minute interview are available on this blog. More will follow
Those so far are:
1. How algorithms caused the credit crunch
2. Why email stuffs Facebook et al
3. Humanising brands
4. Scoring collaboration in education