I recently travelled to Provence in the hills above Nice to give the keynote at the annual EuroCIO conference. I used my framework for the future of the CIO to point to the macro drivers of change in technology and society, and how these are shaping the technology function in organizations, and in turn the role of the CIO.
The single most important shift in society is that we expect more on just about every front that we can imagine. We expect more in everything around us, in terms of excellence in quality and service, opportunity for ourselves and our children, flexibility in our work, and openness and transparency from business and government.
We also expect beauty.
It is a core aspect of humanity for us to seek and appreciate beauty, whether it is in the natural world or that which we create.
Certainly art has been central to humanity from our very beginnings. Royalty and the wealthy have long sought to make even their basic tools, utensils, and lodgings beautiful.
Yet during the twentieth century we went dramatically backwards, as functionality was deemed paramount and aesthetics often irrelevant. Le Corbusier’s austere apartment blocks and their East German descendants were a powerful symbol of supposedly efficient yet soulless living.
It is telling that almost all the early personal computers were beige, arguably the ugliest color in existence. Even Apple for the first two decades of its existence stuck its technology in ugly boxes, even though their user interfaces set the standard in usability and attractiveness.
However expectations have risen rapidly over the last couple of decades, to the point at which most of us quite simply expect beauty around us, not least in the tools that we use at work and our personal lives.
After long suffering the same blindness as other computer manufacturers, Apple finally woke up with the revolutionary release of its multi-colored iMacs in 1998, making consumers realize they wanted beautiful computers, not ugly ones. Other manufacturers swiftly responded. Today computers and phones are objects of beauty and aesthetics almost more than of function.
All of this speaks of the rise of design, perhaps the central concept of the 21st century. Design is fundamentally about combining function and aesthetics within constraints.
We of course have extraordinary constraints, not least environmental and economic, however working within those constraints design elegantly brings us function. Elegance is essential, and beauty is a simple step beyond.
Beauty is about transcending the mundane. Today we expect that.
Functionality alone is not enough to succeed in an increasingly crowded marketplace. Beauty is also required. We expect it, we can have it, and we are not prepared to settle for less.
Our expectations are increasingly about self-expression, about surrounding ourselves with things that are aligned with the essence of who we are.
In every domain, from enterprise technology through to consumer goods, companies must realize that beauty is now a basic expectation of their customers. And as they do we will together create a more beautiful world.
Image source: Marcin Wichary
Cities reconfigured: How changing work, shopping, community, and transport will transform our collective lives
By Ross DawsonOne of our companies, Future Exploration Network, recently created a detailed report for a client delving into the most important shifts shaping the next decade and beyond.
One of the themes was Cities Reconfigured. The section began:
Urbanisation has proved to be a dominant global force, shaping both developed and developing countries. We know cities are both spreading out and become denser at their centres, but radical shifts are now reshaping the structure and shape of cities. The rise of flexible, remote and freelance work and shifts where and how people shop and socialise are significantly changing travel patterns. The widespread deployment of data sensors is providing real-time insights into environmental, traffic and infrastructure conditions, enabling rapid response and a deeply-needed increase in urban efficiency.
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Using testable hypotheses to bring lean startup into the enterprise
By Ross DawsonLast week I ran a brief workshop at the strategy offsite of a professional services organization, with their top 100 executives in attendance. They wanted to understand major business trends and the implications for both their own organization as well as the services that will be valuable for their clients.
In a highly interactive session I ran through major trends in technology, business, and society, went into depth on the lessons emerging from lean startups and crowd-based models, and then facilitated groups in generating high-potential ideas for new service lines and creating a high-performance organization.
While many of the concepts of lean startups feel quite foreign within many established organizations, a useful way to help shift thinking is to focus on the concept of ‘testable hypotheses’. This is central to how dynamic startups function, and can fairly readily be introduced into large organizations – and their clients – without seeming overly radical.
In introducing the idea into enterprise I have found it useful to frame testable hypotheses as 5 steps:
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Crowdsourcing Pioneer Trada Closes Down: Insights and Implications
By Steve BynghallCrowdsourced search engine marketing company defunct after $17m in funding.
For those following Trada’s recent activities, the news of the company’s demise doesn’t come as a huge surprise. In late 2013 there were significant layoffs and hints at a restructure, and a change in direction around a product called PPCPath. This new emphasis was clearly not enough to reverse Trada’s fortunes and after seven years the firm has shut down.
An early pioneer
When we wrote the first edition of “Getting Results from Crowds” in 2011, Trada was one of the pioneering crowdsourcing companies which looked like one of the most likely to succeed. It’s model of using a crowd of pay-per-click experts (called “Optimizers”) to create web adverts, identify the right keywords and then refine results was a first.
This model seemed well-poised to give small and medium-sized companies a decent ROI and also reward the best Optimizers. It also meant companies could leverage the crowd at short notice to get campaigns up and running quickly, and get a wide set of perspectives to uncover new keywords.
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Building richer mental models is the heart of strategy – the role of scenario planning
By Ross DawsonStrategy is an intrinsically human task. Setting successful strategies is based on our ability to think effectively, both individually and collectively, about extraordinarily complex domains.
In a recent keynote I did for clients of New Scientist magazine on Science and Leadership for the Future, I discussed how executives can think effectively about strategy.
The following video is one of a series of 7 videos that captured the entire keynote.
In the video I note:
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Avatars Ascending: How robots will affect learning, skill development and jobs
By Vanessa Cartwright“Today, when you get a degree, it is already out of date.” This observation by futurist Ross Dawson reinforces the challenge of keeping pace with the smart machine era. Dawson believes that employment, skills and learning must respond to the growing roles of robots in our lives.
Will robots assail or avail the jobs market?
In an article from CIO Magazine predicting smart machine innovations, Forrester analyst Tim Sheedy states, “2015 will be the year we start to see information worker job losses because of intelligent systems.” The article also quotes a startling forecast by Gartner analyst Kenneth Brant: by 2020, smart machines will disrupt the majority of knowledge workers’ careers.
The rise of robots beyond the household and the blue-collar industries is complicating career choices. Zarif Aziz, a new engineering student at the University of Sydney, believes that robots will eventually replace most human workers. By studying a Mechatronics major, Aziz hopes to one day design robots and thereby secure himself a career.
The demand for innovative machines certainly boosts jobs in engineering, technology, and science. However, as Ross Dawson has told CIO Magazine, jobs for humans are not necessarily declining. Instead, jobs are changing in the type and level of skills they require. This was a focal point of Dawson’s keynote speech at the Youth Festival of ICT (YITCon), hosted by the Australian Computer Society.
Having the will to master new skills
At YITCon, Dawson recommended upskilling as a strategy to retain employability. He suggested that skills in complementary disciplines are likely to remain in demand, especially skills that are globally applicable. A Masters in both business and data analytics, for example, could prove more useful than a Masters in business alone.
Furthermore, Dawson explained that people who actively participate in social learning and informal learning would adapt better to the future. Competitions, such as the programming contests run by TopCoder, can encourage skill development and learning from peers. Likewise, Dawson recommends engaging with experts on social media to develop one’s own expertise. This is because community interactions, whether in person or online, remain vital to social learning.
Social skills and emotional intelligence will be crucial to a future where we collaborate with robots. As Aristotle once wrote, “Man is by nature a social animal.” Our penchant for relationships gives us a genuine advantage over robots, Dawson asserted.
Learning to build relationships with robots
Collaboration with robots can actually foster mutual learning. For example, children learning to write can teach the CoWriter robot to show improvements in its handwriting. By watching humans, the Apprentice Robots developed by Pieter Abbeel have learnt to fold laundry and fly model helicopters without being programmed for these specific tasks. Using virtual reality and 3D printing technologies, a full working robot from hardware group Wevolver will soon accompany a hospitalized child’s friends to the zoo. The child will conveniently direct the robot’s interactions from a remote control at the hospital.
Despite the value in such initiatives, robots’ growing capacities for independent learning have provoked ethical concerns and inspired many a dystopian movie. Nonetheless, robotics specialist Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro remains optimistic about a future where humans and humanoids will develop close relationships. Robots, he believes, will become our companions and social partners.
Humanity ahead of machines
However, robots lack intrinsic humanity. As Dawson reminded the listeners at YITCon, our ability to make high-level ethical decisions clearly sets us apart from our avatars. And we shouldn’t forget the vital skill that lets us make robots in the first place: creativity. The power to create what we dream, as Dawson said, “keeps us miles ahead of the machines”.
Image source: Steve Rainwater
How soaring expectations of beauty are shaping technology and society
By Ross DawsonI recently travelled to Provence in the hills above Nice to give the keynote at the annual EuroCIO conference. I used my framework for the future of the CIO to point to the macro drivers of change in technology and society, and how these are shaping the technology function in organizations, and in turn the role of the CIO.
The single most important shift in society is that we expect more on just about every front that we can imagine. We expect more in everything around us, in terms of excellence in quality and service, opportunity for ourselves and our children, flexibility in our work, and openness and transparency from business and government.
We also expect beauty.
It is a core aspect of humanity for us to seek and appreciate beauty, whether it is in the natural world or that which we create.
Certainly art has been central to humanity from our very beginnings. Royalty and the wealthy have long sought to make even their basic tools, utensils, and lodgings beautiful.
Yet during the twentieth century we went dramatically backwards, as functionality was deemed paramount and aesthetics often irrelevant. Le Corbusier’s austere apartment blocks and their East German descendants were a powerful symbol of supposedly efficient yet soulless living.
It is telling that almost all the early personal computers were beige, arguably the ugliest color in existence. Even Apple for the first two decades of its existence stuck its technology in ugly boxes, even though their user interfaces set the standard in usability and attractiveness.
However expectations have risen rapidly over the last couple of decades, to the point at which most of us quite simply expect beauty around us, not least in the tools that we use at work and our personal lives.
After long suffering the same blindness as other computer manufacturers, Apple finally woke up with the revolutionary release of its multi-colored iMacs in 1998, making consumers realize they wanted beautiful computers, not ugly ones. Other manufacturers swiftly responded. Today computers and phones are objects of beauty and aesthetics almost more than of function.
All of this speaks of the rise of design, perhaps the central concept of the 21st century. Design is fundamentally about combining function and aesthetics within constraints.
We of course have extraordinary constraints, not least environmental and economic, however working within those constraints design elegantly brings us function. Elegance is essential, and beauty is a simple step beyond.
Beauty is about transcending the mundane. Today we expect that.
Functionality alone is not enough to succeed in an increasingly crowded marketplace. Beauty is also required. We expect it, we can have it, and we are not prepared to settle for less.
Our expectations are increasingly about self-expression, about surrounding ourselves with things that are aligned with the essence of who we are.
In every domain, from enterprise technology through to consumer goods, companies must realize that beauty is now a basic expectation of their customers. And as they do we will together create a more beautiful world.
Image source: Marcin Wichary
Mapping the entire human brain using AI and crowdsourcing: will we discover who we are?
By Ross DawsonWho we are largely resides in our brain, a dense network of 100 billion neurons. So far we have gained only tiny insights into how it is connected to give us the extraordinary capabilities and consciousness humans possess.
However one researcher may have found a path to uncover that rich lattice of connections, potentially showing us the essence of who we are.
Video: Real-time brain activity visualization from UCSF
An excellent article today in the New York Times titled Sebastian Seung’s Quest to Map the Human Brain describes the mission of Prof. Seung of MIT and Princeton Neuroscience Institute to map literally all the connections in a human brain.
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The future of events: technology to make presentations interactive and social
By Ross DawsonSome events today have innovative formats and strong audience participation. However many conferences still sport essentially the same format as ever, a series of people presenting on a stage in front of a passive audience. It needn’t be this way. Technology eenables us to re-conceive what a presentation is and can be.
I approach this idea as both a speaker and an event organizer. I have been a professional speaker for over 15 years, and have also organized many conferences and events, including our Future of Media Summits, the first cross-continental conferences ever held.
A recent article in Sydney Morning Herald on how the new app Zeetings helps “keep audiences awake” looks at Zeetings, “a presentation app that is both interactive and social, and promises to stop audiences slumbering in their chairs.”
The article describes the background of the app and goes on to quote me:
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Is bigger data better? Helping “HiPPOs” make big data decisions
By Vanessa CartwrightAt the annual Thought Leadership Forum in Melbourne, Ross Dawson delivered an insightful keynote speech on this topic. He says that in domains where sufficient data is available and the decisions are definable and tractable, algorithms will surpass human judgement.
What is new compared with longstanding analytic practices is the rapidly growing volume of data and the diversity of sources. In a study by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson of MIT, companies using data-driven decisions and predictions were shown to be 6% more profitable than their competitors using human intuition and HiPPOs.
Yet Dawson doubts the effectiveness of algorithms in situations which cannot be clearly defined. “A prominent example is an organization’s strategic positioning. Any data-driven model of industry structure and potential decisions will be based on implicit assumptions by the creator of the algorithm.” And McAfee and Brynjolfsson emphasize that human insight is still very much needed. Humans see the opportunities and the challenges. And they ask the right questions, which will eventually be answered by data and algorithms.
Data can show the way consumers navigate through a website, which products they look at and which ones they buy. The products on the Amazon site are placed and shown accordingly, optimized for each customer. Often the many small decisions, following a well-defined model, are the ones done perfectly by algorithms. And those millions of good decisions on which books to show, for which customer, add up to a substantial profit. Even if the algorithm is occasionally wrong, it rarely matters.
However, it’s a different story if there is only one significant decision to make, especially one which is hard to define. Then humans want to get involved.
Combining both worlds
Dawson points out that big data needs interpretation and communication in order to be able to support human decisions. And while many jobs will be replaced by algorithms, a growing number of jobs will be needed to mediate between data, algorithms, and human decision-makers.
This appears to be in line with managers’ views. In a study of C-level executives by the Economist Intelligence Unit in September 2014, nearly half believe big data to be a useful tool, while only less than a quarter believe it will revolutionize the way businesses are managed. The biggest named obstacle to using data more extensively is the lack of managers’ understanding of how to apply data in their functions, while the most named solution to this is to create enterprise-wide teams to assess and propose approaches.
“The true professional is one who can communicate data in a way that changes the thinking of the highest-paid person,” Dawson says. “This is a human art requiring relationship skills that far transcend those of computers.” These people need to understand human cognition and empathy as much as they understand the data. Let the HiPPOs and trained professionals decide—and keep them well informed with qualified data.
For more on this topic read this post by Ross Dawson.
Image source: Caitlin
Three critical domains of change driving the future of professional services
By Ross DawsonYesterday professional services expert George Beaton and I ran the inaugural Clients and Firms of the Future: How to Compete conference in Sydney, bringing together around 100 senior leaders of professional services firms to look at the future of the industry.
It is just over 15 years ago now that my first book was released with the subtitle The Future of Professional Services (now out in its Second edition). While these days my work covers a far broader scope, over the years I have worked extensively with professional services firms to help them create successful futures.
There has been substantial change in the professions over the last decade, however there will unquestionably be far greater change in the years to come.
It was an absolutely fascinating day at the conference exploring the future of professional services. I will be sharing more from the conference over time, but today would just like to put down a few initial thoughts from the three themes of the day.
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