In a recent post titled Demonetized Cost of Living, Peter Diamandis describes how technological socialism (i.e. having our lives taken care of by technology) will drive our cost of living close to zero. A similar case was made by Economist Jeremy Rifkin in his book titled The Zero Marginal Cost Society. Diamandis defines demonetization as the ability of technology to take a product or service that was previously expensive and making it substantially cheaper, or potentially free; removing money from the equation. Demonetized is one of the Six D’s of digital, as described by Diamandis.
Year: 2016
Connecting Dots
I participated in a radio show yesterday brought to you by Coffee Break with Game Changers. The show was hosted by Bonnie D. Graham and is now available on-demand here. When asked about a leadership trait required to effectively navigate our exponential future, I echoed something I have positioned many times via this Blog: Connecting Dots. The speed dimension that has accelerated our pace will put those dots in constant motion – so it’s a continuous state of connecting that makes this more challenging than our forward looking efforts of the past. The foundation for this argument was positioned in my post describing how Disruptive Power Lies at the Intersections. This visual from that post leverages my anchor visual on our emerging future.
Blockchain, Artificial Intelligence, Renewable Energy and More
The airwaves are filled with talk of exponential technologies like Blockchain, Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, Renewable Energy and more. In addition, societal factors that influence or are influenced by technology are getting more attention. So what’s the buzz?
Continue readingWhat’s Next for Your Business? Ask A Futurist!
I will be participating in another radio show brought to you by Coffee Break with Game Changers. The show is hosted by Bonnie D. Graham tomorrow 7-12-16 at 10:00 am EST. You can listen live or at your convenience after the show.
Episode Description
The buzz: Need X-ray vision? Business and social cultures are changing faster and in more ways than we ever imagined! Take Brexit, where an economic, political and social ripple disrupted the world after a majority vote by UK citizens to leave the EU. Compounding this, new technology innovations – i.e., virtual reality systems, artificial intelligence, self-driving cars, the Internet of Things – are transforming every company, while new business models are transforming entire industries. How can you see “around corners” and be proactive? Ask a Futurist for the secrets behind their long-range lens. The experts speak. Frank Diana, TCS: “The future started yesterday and we’re already late” (John Legend). Gray Scott, Futurist: “It is better to err on the side of daring than the side of caution” (Alvin Toffler), Kai Goerlich, SAP: “The future belongs to those who see possibilities before they become obvious.” (Oscar Wilde) Join us for What’s Next for Your Business? Ask A Futurist!
Internet of Things: Economic Benefit and Challenges Lie Ahead
On June 15th, I participated in an Internet of Things Webcast with CA Technologies. A replay of the event can be found here. The abstract for the session read as follows.
In just a few short years, we’ve moved from being a web-economy to an application economy. One of the underlying reasons are thousands of new Internet of Things (IoT) applications, from manufacturing sensors to medical devices, automobiles to homes. Industry experts predict IoT has the potential for an economic benefit of up to $6.2 trillion by 2025. Are you ready to address the fast-approaching era of hyper-connectivity and voluminous data with your business networks? Do you have a strategy to turn your IoT into sustainable growth opportunities? Do you have the visibility to ensure your network can support these new applications and the flood of data that comes with them?
Join Frank Diana, Futurist and Digital Transformer with Tata Consultancy Services, to learn the new meaning of having an IoT-connected business in the future. He will be joined by Bernard Clairmont, Presales Consultant with CA Technologies, to explain the importance of having a sophisticated network performance management and diagnostic solution to be ready for the future of connectedness.
Like so many emerging innovation accelerators, the Internet of Things will be massively transformative. The time to act is now.
Technology and Ethics
Some in the Futurist community are focused on technology and ethics. Gerd Leonhard has been particularly vocal on the topic. I’ve dedicated a section of my keynote to what I believe will be a growing dialog. I use this slide to pose a question to the audience:
The example provided above comes from Ray Kurzweil, famous Futurist, Inventor and author. In an appearance at last years Exponential Finance conference, Kurzweil said this:
“Our thinking will be a hybrid of biological and non-biological thinking. We’re going to gradually merge and enhance ourselves. In my view, that’s the nature of being human – we transcend our limitations. We’ll be able to extend (our limitations) and think in the cloud. We’re going to put gateways to the cloud in our brains.”
Ecosystem Models and Value Design
The road to future ecosystems is paved by stakeholder action in the coming decades. These ecosystems support life experiences and have no regard for industry boundaries. Over time, established peer-to-peer relationships lead to value creation and capture for all ecosystem participants. Along the way, value design gets complicated, as multi-stakeholder ecosystems introduce complexity. It is value design that I believe challenges traditional thinking, both in how we view relationships and how we share value. As traditional thinking gives way, the resulting ecosystems have the potential to move towards the collaborative commons described by Jeremy Rifkin.
The Driverless Car: Fast Lanes or Speed Bumps?
The driverless car is one of many emerging future scenarios that drive multiple paradigm shifts. As these shifts converge, they intensify the critical need for leaders to think differently about a world where the future arrives faster than people think. This speed is unappreciated, undermining the levels of urgency required to survive in this exponential age. I sat with Chunka Mui recently to discuss these shifts, using the driverless car to explore the challenges of our emerging future.
Chunka Mui is the managing director of the Devil’s Advocate Group, a consulting group that helps organizations design and stress test their innovation strategies. As a consultant on strategy and innovation, Mr. Mui has spent considerable time analyzing the driverless car scenario. He asked a question in his book The New Killer Apps about autonomous vehicles and what happens if traffic accidents are reduced by 90% as Google predicts. This simple question makes visible the broad and deep implications of these future scenarios. As society responds to their implications, new ecosystems emerge that alter our world. In this case, the driverless car is one of numerous components of an emerging mobility ecosystem that is defined by the responses that are playing out right now.
I will share insights from our interview in a series of posts, starting with this one. In this segment of the interview, Mr. Mui and I discussed the growing need to rehearse the future.
Women Leadership in an Exponential World
I was honored to deliver the opening keynote at the SIM Women Executive Leadership Forum on Thursday May 5th. SIM Women Founder Kristen Lamoreaux did a wonderful job organizing the program. I met some fascinating leaders that selflessly give their time to their communities and society in general. As we look at the challenges that face our world, these are the type of leaders I want to stand with. In a room full of outstanding women, I saw the leaders of our future. As our exponential pace accelerates, a gap widens between exponential progression and our linear and incremental progress. This gap represents disruptive stress or opportunity – and increasingly, it is our right brain characteristics that help determine which.
Creativity, imagination, big picture vision, emotional and social intelligence, empathy, and other human characteristics are critical to navigating in an exponential world. As automation accelerates, these human traits become even more critical. In a recent report by Citi on Technology at Work, the authors point to our propensity for social interaction, communication, and empathy being something machines can never replace. Women excel in these areas, positioning them as leaders of our emerging future. In a different Citi report on Women in the Economy, they highlight the importance of women in the labor market, where a 50% reduction in the gender gap can lead to a 5% increase in global GDP. Women are uniquely positioned to play a critical role in the digital economy.
At this SIM event, I focused on our emerging future and the unlearning that it requires. The last time we faced a similar scenario was a century ago, as a shift occurred from the steam engine era to the electricity era. That transition did not go well – something I’ll explore in future posts. We find ourselves approaching another transitory point in history. Will we learn from history? My focus remains on this transition and the mindset shift so crucial to navigating the change. This time, I believe women leadership could be the difference. You can view the presentation Here.
Our Emerging Future
In my last post, I added more future scenarios to this visual describing the complexity and impact of our emerging future. The one piece left unfinished was the expansion of innovation accelerators to include emerging and future accelerators. With input from TCS CTO Ananth Krishnan, I have added a number of accelerators to the visual.
Cyberwar, De-Extinction, and Precision Agriculture
I’m wrapping up another book titled The Industries of the Future. Author Alec Ross explains the advances and stumbling blocks that emerge in the next ten years, and describes a way to navigate them. He is one of America’s leading experts on innovation, serving four years as Senior Advisor for Innovation to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Mr. Ross is currently a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Johns Hopkins University. His book identified three future scenarios that I have added to the visual below. These scenarios are Cyberwar, Precision Agriculture, and De-Extinction.
The Modern Workforce: Four Crucial Shifts
Here is the summary of a recent article I wrote for the Insurance Innovation Reporter. Please visit their site to see the full Article.
Accelerating advancements in science and technology have set the foundation for massive shifts in the decades ahead, yet we continue to operate on a platform meant for a different time. This platform has hit a productivity wall, and a new emerging platform has changed the expectations of those we engage with. As they advance, these shifts will challenge our long held beliefs and intuition, while changing long standing business models across industries. In the face of this, organizations must unlearn what they know and embrace new ways of thinking. This is especially important in our approach to the workforce and the evolution of our management paradigm. How we lead the modern workforce will require change, and it starts with four crucial shifts: embrace a new way of working, move towards a collaborative management paradigm, value human characteristics, and plug into the emerging platform.
Technology, Social Change, and Future Scenarios
If we are to Think about the Future in a way that helps us thrive in that future, we must excel at connecting dots. I developed the Future Scenarios visual in an attempt to help visualize the dots, as well as the various intersections that amplify the impact of those dots. In parallel with this scenario view, I have looked at various aspects of social change that both influence and impact these scenarios – and vice versa – but until now, those views were separate. Convergence is occurring not just across the technology and future scenario curves, but also the various aspects of social change. So in the interest of maximizing future thinking impact, I have combined the two views and will describe a connecting the dots scenario. First, the new future scenario visual:
Transforming the Automotive Industry
A new McKinsey report focuses on the Disruptive trends that will transform the auto industry. Their work suggests that the world economies are dramatically changing via developments in emerging markets, the exponential pace of technology, sustainability policies, and changing consumer preferences around ownership. They see the rise of four disruptive trends in the automotive sector: diverse mobility, autonomous driving, electrification, and connectivity. For me, these findings underscore the movement from our current automotive industry to the future Mobility Ecosystem. If we can make the mental model shift from our long standing view of Industry and competition, to this emerging view of ecosystem and shared value, we can begin to visualize the different ways value will be created and captured in the future.
Game-Changers Radio Focuses on the Rising Billions
I enjoyed participating in another episode of Coffee Break with Game-Changers this morning. The show’s title was: The Digital Economy is about to get more connected: The Rising Billions. I hope you get the chance to listen to the rebroadcast. The show was expertly moderated by Bonnie D. Graham, and my fellow panelists included Dennison DeGregor, the Worldwide Group Executive for CX Services at HP, and Paul Donovan, Senior Director in Solution Management at SAP.
The show abstract: According to Peter Diamandis of Singularity University, the most dramatic (positive) change in our global economy is about to occur between 2016 and 2020. He says that 3 to 5 billion new consumers, who have never purchased anything, never uploaded anything and never invented and sold anything, are about to come online and provide a mega-surge to the global economy. He calls this group the “Rising Billions.”
Technology giants like Google, Facebook, and SpaceX are all working hard to make this happen, and when it does, connectedness will take on new meaning. What will it mean to have a connected business in 2020? Now is the time for your company to begin addressing the fast-approaching era of hyper-connectivity in your business networks and turn it into sustainable growth opportunities. If you thought you were challenged to create the “The Internet of Me” today, that challenge is about to get much more complex.
Creating a Wellness Ecosystem
I am a firm believer that platform supported ecosystems will ultimately displace our current industry constructs. Given the uncertain nature of this transition, Future Thinking is a critical skill for any leader or organization to embrace. I have used the Driverless Car scenario as a way to describe future thinking and in this case, the progression towards a mobility ecosystem. I did a similar piece on Connected Health, which is likely the early manifestation of an emerging wellness ecosystem. This recent report on The Future Health Ecosystem provides a glimpse into the transition towards this wellness ecosystem. The author describes an expected shift of $1 trillion of the $3 trillion spent on healthcare to new players and business models; which could have devastating consequences for incumbents.
A Forbes article on this recent report looks at the major life transitions that the two largest generations in history are in the midst of – and the profound impact it will have on healthcare. Some of the very interesting findings – and clear drivers of a wellness ecosystem – are:
3 Billion more People Online by 2020
Join me on Game Changers radio on Wednesday February 10th at 11:00 EST. We will be discussing the rising billions and their world changing implications
The buzz: Acting hyper. Peter Diamandis predicts the most dramatic positive change in our global economy will occur between 2016-2020, when 3–5 billion new consumers–who’ve never purchased, uploaded, invented or sold anything–come online, sparking a hyper-connectivity mega-surge. Who are they? The “Rising Billions.” Tech giants Google, Facebook, and SpaceX are working to make this happen. How will your company turn the resulting complex hyper-connectivity into sustainable growth opportunities? The experts speak. Frank Diana, TCS: “Three billion new minds are about to join the global conversation” (Peter Diamandis). Dennison DeGregor, HP: “By end of 2017, the CMO will have larger budgets for technology than the CIO” (Gartner). Paul Donovan, SAP: “The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence” (Nikola Tesla). Join us for The Rising Billions: Business Networks and the Digital Economy.
The Rising Billions
According to Peter Diamandis of Singularity University, the most dramatic change in our global economy is about to occur between 2016 and 2020. He says that 3 to 5 billion new consumers, who have never purchased anything, never uploaded anything and never invented and sold anything, are about to come online and provide a mega-surge to the global economy. He calls this group the “Rising Billions.”
Technology giants like Google, Facebook, and SpaceX are all working to connect the world. Once connected, this exploding online community introduces new markets, creating a $30 trillion consumption opportunity by 2025 – and emerging markets will grow 75% more rapidly than developed markets. As discussed in a recent post on Changing Beliefs, this shift from developed to emerging markets requires a change in the approach used to win in these markets, as products and services from developed markets cannot simply be transplanted into emerging markets. But these rising billions are more than a market opportunity. They are a source of ideas, innovation, knowledge, skills, capacity, passion, learning, insight, and foresight.
The Future of the Future with Game Changers
I participated today in a new SAP sponsored thought leadership series titled the Future of the Future. Here is a snippet from the opening talking points:
The buzz: Wow! McKinsey estimates the 2025 potential annual economic impact of the Internet of Things at $11 trillion, 11% of the world economy.
The rebroadcast of the radio show is now available.
Source: The Future of the Future with Game Changers, Presented by SAP | VoiceAmerica™
A deeper dive into the world of the Internet of Things can be found here.
The Future of the Professions: Institution 2.0
In a recent book titled The Future of the Professions, the authors describe an emerging paradigm shift in what I view as The Year of Shifts. They see significant change in the way expertise is made available to society, and envision a time when professionals will no longer be the dominant interface between lay people and the expertise required to address their own particular circumstances. The main hypothesis explored centers on a technology-based Internet society, and increasingly capable machines. These machines operating on their own or with non-specialist users, will take on many of the tasks that have been the realm of the professions. They predict an incremental transformation in the short term, with an eventual dismantling of these traditional professions.
This line of thinking fits with the Structural Change enabler as viewed through the lens of transformation in the digital age. It has prompted me to add another future scenario to my scenario visual, this one labeled “Institution 2.0”.
Reimagining the Future 
