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

What success looks like in the post Covid-19 reality

Two very rapid shocks to our system are happening within six months. Two Black Swans. The first - the emotional, economic and health trauma of COVID-19, we didn't see coming. The second, the COVID-19 economic Bounce Back - that we can.
Best predictions are that the UK economy will contract by 35% this quarter but bounce back (perhaps we should call it Boom Back) to plus 30% in the following quarter. That positive shock is just as hard for organisations to handle as the negative one - think of the impact on supply chains, labour demand, infrastructure use, retail demand, capital and cash flow requirements etc. The bounce back looks like being as short and as sharp as the crash we have experienced. An extreme impact black swan in the other direction. And one you KNOW is coming.
The expectation is that after the bounce back there will be a resettlement of the economy to a new stasis with a smaller GDP on a global scale. I will return to this new stasis shortly.
But first a note on the decisions facing us now. The greatest threat to your organisation right now is in choosing the 'hunker down' option. This may appear counter-intuitive. But in hunkering down (ie reduce costs as much as possible, try to get by with the trickle of business you sustain, scale back ambition and initiatives, return to basics, halt investment in the new etc etc... you've been in those meetings) you make your organisation more fragile to the next shock just as the second black swan looms. You will not be prepared for the shock of the upturn.
The net result is you are choosing to be a victim of the first crash, taking all of the hit with no levers available to you to take advantage of the bounce back. Lose-Lose when you could have at least come out evens with a Lose-Win response.

Returning now to the new, post Boom-Back stasis, the new normal if you will.
I wrote recently about The Second Order Consequences of COVID-19, which I urge you also to consider in your preparations for life after the Boom-Back. In it I start to unpack the disruption that will follow.

To those I would like to add a handful more:
1. Digital magicians have had their day. The mystery of digital is rapidly dissipating as even the most Luddite leader is forced to learn how to DIY digital, to maintain any semblance of control over their business and people. The thing they thought they needed an 'expert' for, they have (and not through choice) found they really don't. This means:
2. Digital Transformation will have to go well beyond the tools and training. Everyone and their aged mother now 'gets' digital. The dads are discovering they can dance at this wedding and they don't care who is watching. So digital transformation must now be more about business models not simply the roll out of Teams. That stuff was always IT. Digital is new ways of working and new ways of doing business.
3. High Street Honeymoon: Pop-up shops. This will be a short term boom. The High Streets will be rammed for while but fall back to a-bit-less-than-now shortly after. So, pop-up shops and everything that supports that will explode. Expect markets to get a new lease of life.
4. Value your people people: The first meeting may be the only one in a travel-budget constrained world. Those who are excellent at building rapport will be at an advantage in rapidly building relationships that can continue online.

I want to build on these now to identify the a broader impact on the skills we value in business and the ambitions we have for organisations. The most important may be an end to the idolising of growth.

Grow Or Die, is dead.
The double black swan shock we are going through, followed by the new globally reduced GDP in the mid-term at least, offers us the opportunity to ask what success now looks like.
Are you a successful nation, company, individual or leader if you earn less this year than last?
We are going to have to get comfortable with answering Yes to that question. At the heart of this challenge is the Grow Or Die mythology.
Today we understand that myth is leading us toward environmental collapse. Grow And Die.
Success in a world of less is more aligned to human happiness. After all, our economy was never meant to simply generate a GDP figure. What should it be for? Perhaps to deliver happiness.
Doughnut Economics offers us some clues: "The framework was proposed to regard the performance of an economy by the extent to which the needs of people are met without overshooting Earth's ecological ceiling." In this model the job of the economy is to generate a safe and just space for humanity to thrive.
If that is the job of the economy (rather than to deliver growing GDP) then what is the job of a business or organisation within that economy?
These questions lead me towards the triple-bottom-line thinking captured in the Planet Experience frameworks I have been developing - and an increasing demand for ecologically sound business and products.
In Planet Experience we have a way of being successful without costing the earth, without taking more than we need, and in line with the needs of humanity.
Being successful in 2021 will be all about how well you adapt to thrive within the constraints of a clearly constrained environment.
Empathy is now a key survival skill where ruthlessness was once lauded. Co-operation and collaboration are back.
And that, already, makes me happy.

Photo by Larm Rmah on Unsplash

2nd Order Consequences of COVID-19

The Great Interruption of 2020 will lead to the Great Disruption of 2021. And this will be a disruption unique since World War II - one which took everyone by surprise and is pretty much evenly distributed in a very short period.
Tech disruptions tend to impact over 20 year cycles. This is something different. COVID-19 is driving massive habit change and with it the potential to have deep impact on society - potentially culture-changing impact. We are seeing the initial impact immediately.
Again, uniquely, we have the Great Pause we are all being forced to contemplate, to prepare for what comes next.
There are the first order consequences we see reported on our evening news. The economic shut-down, the school closures, the strain on supply chains.
And then there are the second and third order to come.

Consider:
1. Demographics: Beyond the first order consequence of the death of one-in-ten aged over 80 (which is about in line with deaths from all causes for the over 80s in a typical year), the bigger impact will be in a slump in pregnancy rates. Since COVID-19 was identified as a risk to pregnant mothers, sales of birth control went through the roof. So we can expect a 3-4 month birth lull in 9-12 months time. That gap will be present as it hits the health service, then nursery education age, school age, college age, and entering the workplace in 18-21 years time. That's a lot of flux for all our institutions to handle. The lull is likely to be followed by a boom.
2. Food: Yep, in lock down we think about it a lot. We make meal plans. We start to value 'fresh', we become very conscious of waste, we find time to make from scratch - all the things the convenience (read Easy) generation(s) have bypassed for 20 years. The first order consequence of disruptions to supply lead to second order consequences of increased valuation of the food we do have. New habits forming now could see a mid-term negative impact on restaurants, fast food outlets, convenience food manufacturers... and a positive impact on organic, locally-sourced, fresh suppliers. Reduced consumption (via reduction of waste) is a likely second order consequence across the board.
3. Education: Lessons, quite literally, are being learned about digital. First educators are getting a rapid education in virtual lessons. This has benefits for meeting individual learning styles, aligning with need in more individual ways vs time of day you find best for learning, pace at which you prefer to learn etc. Just as digital has generated the opportunity to move away from treating customers in a one-size-fits-all way, so it reveals an opportunity for segmenting and personalising education which could rapidly accelerate its outcomes for every individual. And beyond that, digital means expanding the capacity of an individual teacher or institution such that we can now teach the world. There's a UN Sustainable Development Goal on the way to being met, right there.
4. Politics: The emergence of an instant Technocracy (rule by unelected experts) is one we seem quite comfortable with. Our politicians right now (as seen from the UK) are pretty much mouth-pieces for their experts - the Chief Medical Officer and the Chief Science Officer bringing a level of evidence-based rigour to decision-making that our very generalist politicians are quick to defer to. Will this be forgotten when our experts on the economy make comment on issues (such as) Brexit in the future? That remains to be seen but trust is science is (outside of the flat-earthers, anti-vaxxers and 5G fallacy peddlars) at an all time high. This bodes well for a shift in the political landscape toward one where the focus is less on what plays well to the gallery (the populist agenda) and more on a test-and-learn, more honest, approach to dealing with the ambiguity of the economy. Less opinions - more evidence. We can hope.
5. Travel. When this lock down is over I suspect a lot of folk will want to travel for pleasure. But from a business point of view, we have learned a lot about how digital really can replace jumping on a plane. Senior execs have been given an accelerated learning and that has positive impacts for their bottom line. Expect travel budgets to be slashed at the very least - with all the second order consequences for airlines, airports, hotels, car rental, conference venues etc.
6. Antifragility - If that sounds like a made up word, let's talk about business resilience instead (though if you are familiar with antifragility, you will appreciate the difference). The bottom line is COVID-19 has revealed to us again how inefficient being too optimised is over anything more than a short-term period. And we cannot predict, with any certainty worth having, how long that short-term may last. Systems - from supply chains, to ways of working, to value proposition have been revealed to be too inflexible to cope with shock. The first order consequence of that is shattered businesses with the shattered lives they leave in their wake. Second order - businesses that survive will have already made themselves anti-fragile in several ways and those that build after will learn from them. The whole notion of leveraging, fantasy multipliers, business plans built on same-happening-next-year-but-a-bit-more must be swept away. Second order may be in the personal realm - we may have just created a generation of savers, folk who will try to build some anti-fragility into their own finances and ways of living. My guess is this will result in reduced consumption as people seek to live lives in reduced debt, building some cash reserves, fore-going the next new car, TV, phone, foreign holiday. Consuming less and savouring more.

All these consequences of COVID-19 (and I'm sure you can think of many others) accelerate the demand for what I had already identified as twin increasing trends:

1. Ways of dealing with the ambiguous, complex requirements of the digital world
2. Ways of handling the rising prioritisation of concerns for the planet.

The first because we face such a period of disruption in which we may see what is hitting us but we lack clarity as to the connections between cause and effect. We have to probe-sense-respond our way through this to develop the most appropriate digital responses.

The second because we have seen we CAN make a difference (in those pollution-falls stories you will have seen). We all have a renewed appreciation of the simple pleasure of time spent in nature. We are all learning the importance of reducing waste. And we are all appreciating more the damaging impact of unchecked consumption on our own lives and on the fragility of the systems, economic and natural, we depend on.

Change is coming. You have time to act. Don't waste the opportunity.

Photo by Melissa Askew on Unsplash

The business logic of Planet Experience

There has never been a better time to shift the way you create value to elevate the planet's experience to the level of the customer's experience (Planet Experience). 

Analysis by PwC in 2018 showed while 72% of companies mention the UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in their annual reporting, only 27% include them in their business strategy. What that says is that they value sustainability - but struggle to make it part of their business as usual.

In Planet Experience, we have a framework for operationalising sustainability and placing it at the heart of value generation and business strategy.

Planet Experience makes for a better business model. Costs fall, innovation drives increased benefits.

1. In acting fast - being proactive - you gain market leadership and get ahead of legislation. 

2. You attract and retain customers, talent, investment. 

3. Drive creative innovation. 

4. Reduce risk to supply chain.

5. Cut energy costs.

6. Cut raw materials costs.

7. Cut water costs. 

8. Cut waste disposal costs. 

9. Savings fund transformation costs. 

10. Sustains the eco-system in which you wish to seek to continue to generate profits. 

Evidence? Take a look at the Ray Andersen TedTalk below. 

Now you are ready to act - get in touch. First hour free 1-2-1 consultancy via video link until the end of April.

Photo by Lukas Blazek on Unsplash

Sustainable value propositions demand the integration of PX

Click to enlarge. Feel free to download and share.

Treating the planet with the respect we have come to understand must be accorded to our customers is not only a 'nice to have' - a box to tick in the latest ESG commitment or vision statement - it is a business imperative in the customer relationships of the next 20 years.

Just as great Customer Experience treats the customer as your partner in a relationship of mutual benefit, so Planet Experience elevates the relationship you have with the planet as one of mutual benefit. The purpose of great customer experience is to reduce the cost of customer acquisition (through recommendation, retention, brand extension cross-sale, upsale etc). It ultimately generates a relationship of trust which is the key ingredient in increased Lifetime Value (LTV).

Planet Experience offers a way for us to integrate the increasing concern your customer has for their planet. The planet can't trust you. Your customer can. But unless you integrate PX, they will see you as the enemy - the exploiter of the thing on which their life -and that of their children - depends.

That is a very powerful motivator. And one you should be integrating into your relationship with them right now.

I have shared frameworks to approach this in previous posts. Today I share a simple way to get started on this with Customer Value Propositions (see diagram). We must ensure PX is one of the key constituents.

Customers know the high price of low cost. It's up to you to demonstrate that when they trade with you there is not just reduced damage to the environment vs alternatives. You need to construct value propositions which call out the benefit they deliver for PX as much as they benefit they deliver for the customer.

Good luck - you've got the whole world in your hands.

No Planet B - so we need Planet X

There's no Planet B - but there is Planet X. Planet Experience is the framework through which we can help make our organisations ones we can all live with; as customers, as employees and as participants in a biosphere we all rely on.

In recent and previous posts I have outlined the value of PX as the new business superpower - shaping our overall experience as potential and repeat customers (Customer Experience [CX]), as potential and continuing employees (Employee Experience [EX]), and in shaping the working culture (Workplace Experience [WX]).

PX elevates the status of the planet in our sustainable success - just as CX elevated the status of customers. No longer is the planet something to exploit, it is something to build a relationship of mutual benefit with. Through the PX filter it is something to purposefully design a relationship of mutual benefit with.

I believe this is important because:

1. It is business which can have most impact - since it is business which drives consumption.
2. Increasing transparency is revealing the impact of exploitation; of planet and people.
3. Customers are increasingly coming to care. The web has revealed our connectedness. We want our experience to be great but only if the cost of delivering it is, literally, one we can live with. I get that this is far from the case for all people in all cases - but the number it is true for is rising, and they carry a large amount of economic power.

Those that dismiss point 3 may suppose that the world is not changing around them - that the reality of climate change, reduced biodiversity, water scarcity, dwindling icecaps can be ignored with little impact on how they do business. The same mindset leads to relationships of abuse with customers, employees and society at large. And we now have increasing evidence that does not lead to economic success or business longevity. Ignore PX and you'll be revealing a lot about your opinion of your customers and employees, too.

But when all is said and done, PX is just the latest (but essential to acknowledge) expression of the long-known business fact that building relationships of benefit is the key to sustainable success. This time the planet needs to benefit, too.

I'm making my thinking on this as open as possible, deliberately. I want others to pick it up, fill the gaps, improve on it, share those improvements - for the benefit of us all.

It's too important for IP. What can you share?

Work with me!

A great week for Open Business

It's been an extraordinary week for raising the profile of Open Business.
At the start of the week I received my copies of the June issue of Admap - the magazine for marketing professionals. It includes a three-page feature on The 10 Principles of Open Business.

The same day I was sent a link showing an article referencing quotes from myself and The 10 Principles (and particularly Open Capital) was included in the June issue of the British Airways in-flight magazine Business Life.

And last night The Guardian published an article they asked me to write on Open Business and its role in the true sustainability of business.

2014 is turning out to be the year of Open Business.

Click here for all previous press references to the book.