Starting in 2011, I focused on the notion of a digital enterprise – a metaphor for the type of organization that is required to survive the massive paradigm shift that lies ahead. In 2013, the focus expanded to analyze disruptive scenarios and the emerging ecosystems and platforms that would give life to those scenarios. There remains a single constant through this work and the many leadership discussions that ensued: it will take a different type of organization – different than the ones most of us grew up with – to survive the shift. We as humans – and the organizations that we created – think and act linearly. The world and technology however is moving exponentially. How then do people and organizations move from linear thinking to exponential thinking? (more…)
Inside the Next Transition
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The Disruptive Role of Near Field Communications
Over the last several years, the big four technologies of the third platform (Social, Mobile, Big Data, and Cloud) have received the lion share of attention, and an emerging class of innovation accelerators like The Internet of Things will capture attention in the coming years. But there are also a number of supporting technologies that serve as enabling components of multiple disruptive scenarios. In some recent presentation preparation work, I focused on technologies like Near Field Communications (NFC) and iBeacon. It was fascinating to find broad applicability across many of the disruptive scenarios on the visual I have used to describe the coming paradigm shift.
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Anticipating 2025 – Part Four: Redesigning Society
Part four of Anticipating 2025 summarizes the fourth section of the book, focusing on redesigning society. Once again, we see how innovation, business, Government, and society converge over the next 20 years. There is an interesting historical pattern emerging that helps explain this phenomenon, while providing a mechanism to predict the future with a higher degree of certainty (more on that in a future post). As you read this, look at how innovation that we normally view through a business lens, is playing out at the societal level. Let’s take a look at each of the topics within this section. (more…)
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Anticipating 2025 – Part Three: Redesigning Artificial Intelligence
Part three of Anticipating 2025 will summarize the third section of the book. This section focused on redesigning artificial intelligence, with a look at six important questions and the exploration of human-machine mergers. The six questions explored in this section are:
- Can we create a human-level artificial intelligence?
- If so, when?
- Will human-level artificial intelligence lead to super-intelligence?
- If super-intelligence arrives, will we like it?
- Can we upload our minds to computers?
- Can we de-risk the arrival of super-intelligence?
Like the first two sections, this section forces us to look at disruption through a different lens. Granted, the path forward is highly speculative, and even the most optimistic scenarios are likely years away from having transformative implications. Nonetheless, it does force us to broaden our lens beyond traditional views. For example, I’ve focused on the automation of knowledge work and all its ramifications, while the authors (Calum Chace, Martin Dinov, and Elias Rut) focus on creating super-intelligence by uploading our minds to computers. They explore a human-machine merger that they see as the enabler of super-intelligence benefits realization. This merger in the author’s view is the only way to avoid creating our successor. So yeah, that’s a little more impactful than automating knowledge work.
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Anticipating 2025 – Part Two: The Future of Medicine
Part two of Anticipating 2025 will summarize the second section of the book. This section focused on three broad topics:
- Will advancing technology make doctors unemployed?
- The future of medicine and the convergence of nanotechnology and biology
- Rejuvenation Biotechnology program
It is fascinating to view this section through a disruptive and transformative lens. The acceleration of scientific advancement intensifies the degree and speed of change, thus positioning the type of paradigm shift that we have not seen since the steam engine. As this recent Forbes article points out, even The Acceleration is Accelerating.
The first topics author is Maneesh Juneja, Digital Health Futurist, and Founder of the Health 2.0 London Chapter. In the opening discussion, the author focuses on technology advancement and the future role of doctors. He describes a backward healthcare system that focuses on treatment versus prevention, and the difficulties of solving this problem when there is no profit in prevention. In researching systems from the past, the author looked at ancient China, where it is said that doctors only received payment while their patients stayed healthy. The author then explores the technologies projected to change the practice of medicine:
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Anticipating 2025 – Part One
I spent time over the Christmas holiday reading a book titled Anticipating 2025. Forward looking analysis that connects leaders with disruptive scenarios and their implications are invaluable, and books like this provide tremendous support. In my next series of Blog posts, I will summarize the salient points from a number of futurists who authored this work. As described in the books opening, futurists are concerned with highlighting a whole range of possible futures, not necessarily pinpointing exactly when something will happen. From the book:
“Futurists seek to draw people’s attention to forthcoming threats, before these threats become too damaging, and to forthcoming opportunities, before these opportunities slip outside of our collective grasp due to inaction on our part”
The book is divided into five sections:
- Setting the scene
- Re-designing medicine and healthcare
- Re-designing artificial intelligence
- Re-designing society
- Redesigning humanity
Part one of this Blog series will set the scene. In the book’s first section, the authors focus on driving forces, big shifts, and roadblocks. It is believed that if developed and deployed wisely, technology could provide a great future of unprecedented abundance, health, and vitality. But there is much uncertainty and a number of obstacles to overcome. In setting the scene, twenty technology areas where wide-ranging developments are 50% likely between now and 2025 are identified:
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Will we Supplant the Steam Engine?
To transform is to make a thorough or dramatic change in form, appearance, or character. Society has transformed several times, but what was the most transformative period in all of history? The folks at MIT set out to answer that question. Through their research and analysis, they determined that the invention of the steam engine ushered in the most transformative period in history.
Over two centuries later, we are likely on the verge of supplanting that transformative period. Unlike the industrial revolutions, when a period of stabilization allowed companies to retrench and exploit the disruptors of the day, this coming period promises no such period. Several key drivers have positioned the next several decades to deliver a staggering – perhaps unprecedented – amount of change. That leads to a question regarding the intensity of the coming transformative period.
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An Interview with Futurist Thornton May
I thought it would be interesting to get a slightly different perspective on the questions that I posed to Futurist Gerd Leonhard in our recent interview. So I reached out to IT Futurist Thornton May. Thornton and I have interacted on a number of occasions at various events. His bio describes him as a futurist, educator and author. His extensive experience researching and consulting on the role and behaviors of C-level executives in creating value with information technology has won him an unquestioned place on the short list of serious thinkers on this topic. Thornton moderates the nationally recognized CIO Solutions Gallery program, intended for executives and senior leaders in the technology and operations communities.
With that background, I was excited to explore these broad topics with Thornton. His perspective follows.
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An Interview with Futurist Gerd Leonhard
Over the last two months, I’ve had the pleasure of interacting with Gerd Leonhard, CEO of The Futures Agency, Futurist, Keynote Speaker, and Author. He is the co-author of the bestselling book titled The Future of Music (2005), and the author of The End of Control, Music 2.0, The Future of Content, and Friction is Fiction.
In 2015, I will continue my focus on disruptive scenarios and their likely impact on the world over the next two decades. What better way to start the year, than to pick the brain of someone who knows a thing or two about disruption – given his time spent in the highly disrupted media and entertainment industry. Here is a summary of our very enjoyable conversation.
Introduction
To kick off our call, Gerd and I discussed the challenge of driving leaders towards a level of urgency and focus on the disruptive period that lies ahead. Our discussion started with the problem of viewing things through a technology lens versus a business model lens, and the mistaken belief that case studies and recipes exist to solve these emerging problems – versus requiring our collective resolution. Gerd used examples from Europe, where leaders look for proof, and invention is not the norm. We discussed the importance of iterative, experimental cycles that explore the unknown, and Gerd’s belief that this approach is not fully embraced in Europe. He did see the Banking Industry as an example of an emerging shift from focusing on changing into something better, to transforming into something new. But for a number of reasons, Gerd felt that at least in the short term, innovation will still come from the U.S. and China, where there is an openness to inventing.
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The Third Revolution
I have used this picture for the better part of 18 months to describe the coming Third Revolution. The visual is getting broader exposure, so I wanted to provide a more detailed description. The blue curve is the science and technology progression curve. The progression of science and technology continues its unabated exponential rise, and leaders can only see so far on the curve. This creates an uncertainty that makes it difficult to understand the implications of technology into the future.
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The CIO Discussion
The CIO role discussion is on fire, and conferences all over the world dedicate considerable time to the ongoing dialog. To add more meat to the discussion, the Corporate Executive Board (CEB) recently positioned Business-Led IT as a model for the future. Chris Mixter, senior director of advisory services for CEB distinguishes it from Shadow IT in this quote from a Forbes Article by Nikki Goth Itoi:
“This is not about the willful or ignorant duplication of core IT services. Your internal business customers are bypassing IT and investing in activities that are driving a critical business outcome.”
This emerging Business-led IT is therefore not what we have historically called shadow IT. The CEB recently found that 78% of business leaders’ priorities for 2014 were dependent on technology. This drives a keen interest in business-led IT, which shares three primary characteristics:
- Funding comes directly from departmental budgets
- The ideas do not require IT approval
- Capabilities are delivered using business resources, external providers, and/or the cloud
Where speed takes priority over efficiency or cost, IT could be shut out of critical business initiatives. According to the CEB, the business spends three times as much on innovation as the corporate IT function does. It is said that you can’t be a CIO these days if you are not versed in the business. Considering the previous statistic on the dependence of business priorities on technology, the same may be true about business executives that are not versed in technology. As business leaders become more technology savvy, the business-led IT phenomenon broadens. The above article also positions an interesting twist on the war for talent. Here’s Chris Mixter again:
“Let’s face it, the best technology graduates in the world aren’t terribly stoked about working in corporate IT. They want to go work in marketing, R&D, or supply chain. And none of those functions are held accountable to the strict pay scales in the HR hierarchies that we are.”
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The Maker Economy
“Any time you give the means of production to everybody, it changes the world.” Chris Anderson, CEO of 3D Robotics
So it goes with the Maker Economy – otherwise referred to as the Maker Movement. According to Industry Analyst Jeremiah Owyang, the Maker Movement puts power in the hands of people to fund, design, prototype, produce, manufacture, distribute, market, and sell their own goods. According to youth market research firm Ypulse, 69% of millennials wish they could create a new product, and 81% would be interested in helping a company design one. This shift in production also shifts power from large, capital intensive enterprises to individual prosumers. As the focus on a next economy increases, so does the likelihood that it is driven by networks of prosumers versus large corporations.
This movement is not a future movement. According to the Infographic below, 135 million makers in America are already growing local economies and creating new jobs – contributing 18 million small businesses in the U.S. and accounting for two out of every three new jobs. When viewed through the lens of 3D Printing Forecasts, the future looks bright as well. One such forecast has the 3D Printing Industry becoming a $16 billion global industry within the next five years, with a 45.7 CAGR. It is also reviving the hardware sector, as VCs pumped $848 million into hardware start-ups in 2013 – nearly twice the prior record of $442 million set in 2012.
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The Smart City
Next up in this ongoing look at disruptive scenarios is the Smart City. For the first time in history, more than 50% of the world’s population lives in cities, and that percentage moves to 70% by 2050.
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IT and Business Integration
The CMO and CIO relationship discussion has been raging for months, and there is a growing perspective that IT budget ownership will shift from IT to the business. Add to this the growing list of new executive roles, and the role of CIO could look very different in the near future. I recently participated in a panel discussion on this topic at a CIO Summit attended by over 40 CIOs. I was somewhat surprised by several of the answers provided by the CIO panel, as well as those provided to poll questions posed during the session. It would indicate that those raging discussions about IT and business integration are unfounded. I thought I’d get a different perspective from someone with one of those new executive titles, so I interviewed Heidi Schwende, a Chief Digital Officer with WSI World. The following are her thoughts on similar questions.
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The Sharing Economy
Something Economy: seems like a popular trend – stick a word in front of economy and use it to describe the next big thing. Some of these words are: Peer, Maker, Sharing, Gig, Collaborative, Green, Circular, Mesh, Digital, Innovation, semantic, and more. This combining of words speaks to the truly disruptive nature of the early 21st century. As part of my focus on business evolution and the inevitable move towards digital enterprises, I have analyzed a number of disruptive scenarios and their implications to traditional companies. This visual describes a combinatorial innovation dynamic that spawns disruptive scenarios:
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Geoffrey Moore on Disruption
In a recent Post, Geoffrey Moore expands his Systems of Engagement (SOE) vision to focus on disruption. Many by now are familiar with his views on SOE and next generation edge architecture. Mr. Moore describes a future dominated by Social and Mobile on the client side and Analytics and Cloud on the server side. In this recent piece, the focus broadens to include the inevitable disruption facing every industry. In doing so, he introduces a new Systems of Business (SOB) concept and provides some examples that highlight the differences between SOB and SOE. These examples help visualize a distinction that Mr. Moore is making between these two systems: systems of engagement instantiate new operating models, while systems of business instantiate new disruptive business models.
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Combinations and Disruption
A recent Report by John Hagel and others describes how the exponential improvement in technology is driving exponential innovation. The core technology building blocks (computing power, storage and bandwidth) continue unabated on a cost-performance improvement curve. These building blocks create a foundation for rapid advances in innovation, which in turn combine to create disruptive scenarios. A visual depiction of this phenomenon might look like this:
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Ecosystem Thinking
The notion of value creation and capture is a core component of business and the models that drive it. While historically viewed with a traditional product mindset, several emerging forces will alter this basic tenet of business. At its core, the way businesses create and capture value will change – the degree of change ranges from transformative to historical. The last several posts focused on the historical – namely Jeremy Rifkin’s view that we are heading towards A New Economic Paradigm. The foundation of Mr. Rifkin’s argument is a Third Industrial Revolution (TIR) platform that takes the marginal cost of production to near zero. Enabled by the Internet of Things, this General Purpose Technology (GPT) Platform could alter our landscape more dramatically than previous GPTs (steam-locomotive-printing press, electricity-auto-telephone). What happens to value creation and capture in a near zero marginal cost scenario?
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The Logistics Internet
The next post in this continued look at disruptive scenarios focuses on the Logistics Internet. In his recent book titled The Zero Marginal Cost Society, Jeremy Rifkin describes an Economic Paradigm Shift driven by a Third Industrial Revolution (TIR) platform. The Logistics Internet is one of three components that make up this TIR platform (communications and energy are the other two). As the three components converge, they create a general purpose technology platform that drives a third revolution. Mr. Rifkin believes we are in the early stages of an automated transport and logistics Internet, and he describes his thinking in this short Video.
In his new book, Rifkin describes the process by which suppliers and buyers connect and conduct business (Logistics) as the driver of the whole economic system. Yet, he maintains that the means by which goods and services are stored and delivered is grossly inefficient and unproductive. Rifkin suggests that a rethinking of the way we store and ship materials and goods is in order. Several supporting facts are provided in the book.
Inside the Next Transition 