Hassan El Bouhali

Thoughts On Adaptability And Resilience

Frank Diana Our Emerging Future, Storytelling , , , , , , , ,

As mentioned in my recent posts, it was 2017 when I participated in a discussion with TCS CTO Ananth Krishnan and CIO extraordinaire Hassan El Bouhali. An animated video was produced to capture a dialog that was initiated as part of an online leadership course focused on the future. The first post launched segment one, which focused on Seeing the Future. The second described the need to relentlessly Rehearse the Future. Given the number of shifts likely to occur, and the pace at which they arise, our ability to adapt is of utmost importance. Here is the abstract for this series followed by the final segment focused on adaptability and resilience.

ABSTRACT: Perspectives on the Journey

A key message in the Reimagining the Future body of work is that our rapidly emerging future challenges every aspect of how we do business, how we govern and how we live. It will drive significant strategic, tactical and structural changes and fundamentally alter our long-standing beliefs, success strategies and institutional constructs. We’re already seeing it. Just look at companies like Amazon, Uber, Airbnb, Tencent, Google, Alibaba and Facebook. They are rewriting the rules and redefining how value is created and captured, using digitally-centered platforms and ecosystem-enabled business models.

As complexity and pace continue to intensify, uncertainty increases and volatility comes to the forefront. Our daily challenges do not disappear however, making the balance between pragmatism and future thinking critical. I invited two business leaders to share their insights and perspectives on the complexity of this transformative journey and the leadership challenges that emerge.

Perspectives On The Journey 2.0 – Rehearsing The future With Ananth Krishnan And Hassan El Bouhali

Frank Diana Our Emerging Future, Storytelling , , , , , , , ,

As mentioned in my recent post, it was 2017 when I participated in a discussion with TCS CTO Ananth Krishnan and CIO extraordinaire Hassan El Bouhali. An animated video was produced to capture a dialog that was initiated as part of an online leadership course focused on the future. The earlier post launched segment one, which focused on Seeing the Future. Given the uncertainty, volatility, and pace of our world, we can only see possible paths. That makes the second piece of the discussion critical: rehearsing the future. Here is the abstract for this series followed by segment two.

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Perspectives On The Journey 2.0 – A Dialog With Ananth Krishnan And Hassan El Bouhali

Frank Diana Our Emerging Future, Storytelling , , , , , ,

It was 2017 when I participated in a discussion with TCS CTO Ananth Krishnan and CIO extraordinaire Hassan El Bouhali. An animated video was produced to capture a dialog that was initiated as part of an online leadership course focused on the future. Upon a recommendation from Hassan, we did a follow-up session several weeks back. This iteration of perspectives on the journey looks back at our original discussion and then ventures into the future. As we did in the first iteration, we broke the dialog into three pieces: seeing the future, rehearsing it, and adapting to its eventual shifts. I will share each video separately starting with “SEE”. We will then animate shorter versions that capture key aspects of our discussion and share them as they become available. As a reminder of what we focused on in this series, here is the original abstract followed by the “SEE” video.

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Revisiting Digital Transformation

Frank Diana Digital Foundation, Transformation , , , ,

Many have drawn the conclusion that those organizations that invested in digital fared much better during the pandemic. When I think back to my early digital transformation content, the forcing functions that I felt would drive organizations to transform seemed clear. So why has the pandemic identified winners and losers? This question had me thinking about a discussion I had recently with colleague Hassan El Bouhali, where we reflected on the past several years in the context of what we expected and what actually happened. We specifically focused on a 2017 Video that Hassan, TCS CTO Ananth Krishnan, and I, did for an online course exploring the future. We decided to produce another video in the near term that reflects on our thoughts from four years ago. In the meantime, I started to revisit my older posts with reflection in mind, starting with my Thoughts on Automation from 2014, and then thinking about the digital discussion going on today.

In 2018, I explored what I felt was At the Heart of Digital Transformation. What strikes me from that post is how often I hear the word resilience today, and how infrequently I heard it back then. In 2015, I had a fascinating discussion with Futurist Gerd Leonhard that I captured in a post titled the Digital Transformation of Business and Society. To this day, that continues to be my most viewed post. It was a wide ranging conversation that covered topics like automation, society, digital governance, and technological unemployment. Gerd spoke of things like, instead of AI, we should refer to it as IA – or intelligent assistant. The key take away from that session was this:

The future is exponential, combinatorial, and interdependent: the sooner we can adjust our thinking (lateral) the better we will be at designing our future.

Digital Transformation of Business and Society
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A Renewed Focus On Our journey

Frank Diana Our Emerging Future , ,

In late 2017, we produced a video as part of a leadership course that focused on seeing the future at some level and rehearsing it in ways that advance it. In the last two weeks Hassan El Bouhali (a participant in the session) shared six different segments from the video on LinkedIn. The posts attracted a great deal of attention, triggering a thought to produce a follow up video. I covered the initial video back in 2018 via a blog post titled Perspectives on the Journey. TCS CTO Ananth Krishnan participated in the original session, driving a dynamic discussion with Hassan. I’ll bring the band back together to look back on our views from 2017, and look forward to what may lie ahead. In the meantime, here is the full video that supports the various segments that Hassan shared.

Preparing for the Future: Part Two

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As mentioned in my previous post, I had the pleasure of hosting two sessions recently at the TCS Innovation Forums in London and New York City. The sessions, which explored the need to prepare for the future, involved thought leaders, futurists, and various leaders across multiple domains. They were structured with several five-minute descriptions of forward-looking themes, and once context was set, a discussion with the broader leadership group was moderated. The sessions focused on education and awareness, rooted in a strong belief that leaders must prepare for and shape our emerging future.

This post will summarize the New York Session, which differed slightly from the one in London. While the London session painted a wide array of evocative future scenarios, the New York session explored several of the key technologies and enablers that will fundamentally shape and impact emerging scenarios. It wasn’t however a technology discussion. This engaging group of thought leaders provided eye-opening facts and focused on implications, both positive and negative. As in London, I opened the session with three key themes from my Expectation post: Acceleration, Possibilities, and Convergence; Here is a look at the insights that followed. 

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Perspectives on the Journey

Frank Diana Business , , , ,

A key message in the Reimagining the Future body of work is that our growing digital world challenges every aspect of how we do business, how we govern and how we live. It will drive significant strategic, tactical and structural changes and fundamentally alter our long-standing beliefs, success strategies and institutional constructs. We’re already seeing it.  Just look at companies like Amazon, Uber, Airbnb, Tencent, Google, Alibaba and Facebook.  They are rewriting the rules and redefining how value is created and captured, using digitally-centered platforms and ecosystem-enabled business models.

Continue reading →