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The Big Wake-Up Call
Last summer, I went to visit my parents in my home state of New Jersey. Earlier in the year, the state’s coastal areas had been ravaged by Hurricane Sandy, a class 2 “superstorm” that inflicted approximately $68 billion in damage. Thousands of homes and businesses had been destroyed on the legendary Jersey Shore, which has an economy largely dependent on beach tourism. Months later, the state was beginning to rebuild.
I wanted to see how the reconstruction was getting along. We drove through town to the bridge that crosses a small river onto the barrier beach of Sea Bright, one of many towns that was battered by waves during the hurricane. Many homes and businesses in the town were still boarded up, and some beachfront buildings I’d known from childhood had been washed out to sea. They were simply gone.
Anyway, on the bridge that leads from the mainland onto the barrier beach, traffic slowed into a jam. My father explained why. “The fire department is taking up a collection to support the local reconstruction of the beaches.” I looked at the volunteers in their Day-Glo vests, at the well-intentioned donating by each and every driver. I couldn’t help but notice that each and every driver happened to be driving a gas-guzzling SUV.
Sure, I admit, there’s no evidence that driving an SUV causes a hurricane. And it is no one’s fault that the natural disaster happened. This is why the insurance industry calls such catastrophic events “acts of God.” I readily admit to my own history of dinner-table skepticism about the notion that human involvement is the prime cause of dramatic climate change, but it must be said that there is increasing evidence that fossil fuel consumption is contributing to global warming, which contributes to rising sea levels, which will ultimately, and sooner than anyone wants to admit, eradicate the beach that these well-intentioned gas-guzzling drivers are donating their spare dollar bills in order to save.
So there’s a measure of cause and effect, even if it’s minute.
It’s interesting that we can so effortlessly ignore how our individual choices contribute even in small ways to what is literally in front of our eyes—in this instance, a disappearing and economically valuable coastline. But there’s growing awareness that there’s something going on with our climate that poses a major threat to our lives. The White House has even put a dollar figure on the cost of the problem, claiming that climate change cost the U.S. economy $100 billion in 2012, the nation’s warmest year on record.
I’m reminded of a conversation I had with Todd, a very articulate young writer and carpenter from Maine who’s currently working in a bicycle shop in Barcelona, where, I add with both admiration and the tiniest of eye rolls, the young bearded entrepreneurs are building bicycles out of sustainably sourced bamboo while brewing artisanal organic coffee. We got to talking about where he thinks things are heading. “The question,” he said, when I told him what I was writing about, “is one of agency. Can each of us really impact the larger system? Do we have agency?” And this, what almost sounded like cynicism, from an extremely thoughtful member of the millennial generation who, regardless of his sense that he may or may not impact the future, still chooses to live and work in a highly localized, environmentally sensible, socially progressive way. His question of agency interests me, because evidence suggests that more and more people choose to act as if they can and will impact the system.
Continuous transformation is the world’s underlying scheme. Yet given the chance, we usually turn away from it, often because we feel that there’s nothing we can do about it.
That is, until we’ve reached a moment full of evidence from which we can’t turn away any longer. It’s like an alcoholic reaching the proverbial rock bottom. And we’ve reached that moment now. All human endeavor and technological progress, since we first stood on two feet and threw a rock to defend ourselves or acquire dinner, has led to a future-defining moment in our evolution—a singular conflux of irreversible social progress and technological innovation. It’s unlike any moment humanity has faced before, a big wake-up call that’s upending our priorities. After forty years of moving from the margin to the mainstream, this wake-up call is the ultimate catalyst of the Conscience Economy.
The Great Conflux
Why did a Conscience Economy not rise out of the smoking ashes of a broken world in 1948? After all, people across the planet had experienced or seen broadcast images of unspeakable cruelty, crumbling nations, and broken enterprise. They’d united for common cause and won. Or what about the 1960s, a time of so much hope and tumult and liberation? Or the 1990s, with its recession-era soul-searching in the wake of a decade of greed, and the birth of the suddenly browsable and thus easily accessed web? What’s so different now? Why is now the moment?
Of course, previous eras of societal rebuilding and broad economic reconfiguration have indeed contributed to the foundations for the current mass movement for good. But this moment, as I am committing these words to the screen and you are reading them, bears hallmarks that are both ominous and hopeful in equal measure. What used to be science fiction has become (as is so often the case with the sci-fi genre) simply science. Or more accurately, simply headline news.
To state the obvious, what’s radically different today is not one thing, but many, in concert. The size and growth rate of Earth’s population. The steady (and successful) march of human rights movements across the planet. The change in environmental conditions. But the biggest difference of all, the one that ultimately gives rise to the Conscience Economy, is technology. Particularly connected technology. It’s both the catalyst and the content of civilization’s big wake-up call. In the right hands, it informs and empowers us. In the wrong hands, it endangers us.
We are currently living through what I call a major conflux. A coming together of various driving forces that are leading us toward a tipping point of significant, possibly cataclysmic change. In no particular order, let’s whizz through some of the most significant change drivers that have moved from the margins into mass consciousness.
A Fragile Environment
Care for the environment has moved from a fringe priority to the refrain of indignant second graders when they see a grown-up trying to chuck a plastic bottle into the trash. “Don’t throw that away. It’s bad for the environment.” Steadily increasing awareness of the fragility of our natural ecosystem, and our role in sustaining it, have been augmented by a series of natural events that, whether caused by humanity or not, have raised huge questions about the future. Depleted reservoirs and dry riverbeds, superstorms, dramatic climate swings, shrinking glaciers, rising sea levels: sustainability is no longer the province of left-wing environmentalists.
Environmental advocacy has been professionalized and standardized, and as a notion, it’s as ubiquitous as freedom itself. It’s even exploited. Supermarket shelves are laden with expensive “green” products. Hotels ask us to “save water” (read: save laundry costs). In cities like San Francisco plastic bags are outlawed. And here’s the thing: whether a recent spate of freak weather was caused by us or not, we no longer talk about it as freak weather. While we line up at the checkout counter stocking up on water and batteries as a threatening superstorm rolls up the coast or a freak blizzard heads our way, we are starting to question our role in the changing climate. Whether provable or not, the notion that we are changing the nature of the universe’s only known inhabitable planet is on our minds. Because it’s probably true.
Scarce Resources
Natural capital is not unlimited. Depending upon the news cycle, the hot button impending shortage can be energy, it can be food, it can be water, it can be copper. What we know is that we have not yet found a way to make our essential resources for living and working and thriving self-sustainable. Meanwhile, distribution is usually our biggest challenge today. It’s not that this is new news. It’s that resource scarcity is affecting increasing numbers of people who’d previously believed they’d advanced beyond it, who believed they lived with expendable abundance. Consider the citizens of the Golden State of California, with their droughts, wildfires, and brownouts. Resource scarcity is one of the primary sources (if not the primary source) of geopolitical conflict. And not just far away. Even if it ultimately helps heat our homes, no one wants fracking in his backyard. Every business—like every person—relies on natural resources in order to exist.
Genetic Engineering
Humans have always tinkered with genetics. Gigi, my parents’ designed-to-be-adorable Maltese terrier, is a lovable, cuddly product of advanced genetic engineering from four hundred years ago. But now that we’ve actually decoded the genome, ostensibly making the foundations of life itself into a kit of parts that can be remixed and reassembled, the cuddliness of gene play has vaporized. Food farming was the first battleground. Across Europe, the wholesale rejection of genetically modified crops is inscribed in law. This is not, as you might think, because tradition-bound Europeans are creeped out by the thought of eating a tomato created in a laboratory. It’s because no one knows the consequences of the uncontrollable and inevitable interaction between genetically modified crops and an unmodified ecosystem. But it’s already too late.
For the record, I’m no genetic Luddite; indeed, the mass movement for good—from improving food supply stability to bolstering nutrition and disease defense to efficient data storage and identity management—will be well served by innovation that’s rooted in tinkering with the genome. But what’s next on this road? Human cloning is inevitable, perhaps initially in the name of disease treatment and organ replacement; creating partially human beings would be a logical next step. And it doesn’t matter if we ban human cloning on the grounds of mass moral outrage. The cat’s out of the bag. If there’s market demand for it, or some kind of humanitarian argument in defense of cloning emerges, why wouldn’t someone, somewhere, make it happen? As with the invention of weapons of mass destruction, we can’t simply erase human developments and discoveries, no matter how morally repugnant they may seem. If we can crack the genome, we can hack the genome. After all, it’s code like any other. Look up biohacking. It’s here.
Networked Warfare
Flashpoints of deadly conflict continue to erupt in fought-over geographies and cities. But over the last three decades, we’ve seen wars increasingly waged through networks of terrorist cells operating in places far from the original source of tension. Fatal attacks on civilians in global cities in effect transport the front lines of battle into the global marketplace. So far, this is a losing strategy, but an unintended consequence of networked warfare is that wars of ideas and values (for example, fundamentalist Islam versus “the West”) are omnipresent, and more of us are more aware than ever of how difficult it is to be a girl in Afghanistan.
At the same time, networked war is effective, and oddly less violent than its prior form. Year by year, though conflicts continue, fewer people are dying in wars than ever before. Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker’s research for his book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined shows a steady decrease in the percentage of people killed in conflict. His findings are substantiated by statistics analyzed by other experts, including Andrew Mack, former head of strategic planning for Kofi Annan at the United Nations. The facts run counter to our gut feeling—because of the increase in violence we see online and in the news. It may feel more horrifying, because violence is more public—in real time—when it happens. The point is, we all feel closer to the implications of conflict, and not only because we have to take our shoes off at airport security or put off that beach holiday in Beirut for another season. When radical Islamists in any part of the world start acting up, we feel a tiny bit nervous on the London Underground. We’re simply closer to the front lines, everywhere. Which is why we all feel it’s our right to weigh in on the issues. But our awareness of violence could be the very reason that, statistically, it’s in year-on-year decline. Though it must be said: one nuclear weapon could still change everything.
Health-Care Volatility
Here lies a mess of anomalies. More of humanity is healthier than ever before, and life expectancy is steadily increasing in much of the world. But simultaneously, there is a broad sense that health care is in crisis. It is regularly reported that within our lifetime we may experience a meltdown of antibiotic effectiveness, thanks to their overuse. The threat of a global pandemic of untreatable and fatal avian flu pops up in the headlines regularly. An obesity “epidemic” is growing across the U.S. and the U.K., fueled in part by increasing poverty and the comforts of highly processed (shareholder-return-feeding) fast food—and yet obesity-related disease in the U.S. alone costs the public coffers upward of $117 billion annually. In those countries that provide health care, social health-care systems are overstretched. In those that don’t, heated debates rage over whether to build one or not. Broad arguments are being expressed in the public sphere. Is health an individual’s responsibility, when our wellness depends upon broader social infrastructure? Meanwhile, people are living longer and will consequently need more care. Who is accountable? Must government always be the answer?
Artificial Intelligence
At the time of this writing, the capabilities of artificial intelligence are limited, and generally delightful. Indeed, we long for more of it. Who among us doesn’t love when our music stream seems to pick the exact right song for us? And who wouldn’t prefer a more personal, intelligent autocorrect on her smartphone? We are regularly reassured that it’s unlikely engineers can create a computer that is smarter than a human being. At least not next quarter. Such a relief.
In the meantime, artificial intelligence is also used in search engines to help you find what you’re seeking. How nice. It’s used to scan your life and discover patterns in your behavior and your communication but not—as far as I know, and I’ve been involved in plenty of decisions about data mining for marketing purposes—on your behalf as a customer. As more information and even service jobs become automated, we won’t be able to live without highly sophisticated artificial intelligence; we’ll invest more and more in it, and its IQ will increase.
Google director of engineering Ray Kurzweil and mathematician Vernor Vinge have even forecast the future occurrence of what Kurzweil refers to as the singularity, a hypothetical moment in time when global computing power will be able to outthink humanity. The date? Sometime between 2017 and 2045. At least that’s not tomorrow. Wait—2017? So are we on our way to assembling the dystopic Skynet of the blockbuster Terminator movies? The Scarlett Johansson-voiced titular object of affection in Spike Jonze’s Her? It doesn’t bear thinking about. Or does it? Maybe I’ll just get back to my amazing Spotify playlist.
Evaporation of Privacy
Ubiquitous digital connectedness is a way of life and even perceived by many of us as a human right. But what about privacy? That convenient free Wi-Fi at the airport? Forget all the hoo-ha about the NSA spying on people in Germany—even the fairness-loving Canadians were recently exposed for using airport Wi-Fi to siphon information out of travelers’ smartphones and laptops.
It would be nice if privacy, like vinyl records, bicycles, and barbershops, made a comeback with the next generation. But right now, they can’t even understand what it once was. As everything we do becomes digitally and contextually enabled, we leave a footprint behind us, a permanent footprint indelibly etched into searchable big data. Where do all these footprints lead?
I mentioned my concern about the evaporation of privacy to a young colleague a few months ago. Her response was fascinating, and not atypical of her cohort. “I don’t really mind,” she said, “because I never do anything illegal.” This was a highly thoughtful young woman, well-educated, successful, progressive. But the blind spot in her logic is concerning, and spoke volumes about a new generation that accepts that all they do is trackable, trading privacy in the interest of convenience. But what if she lived in a place where it were illegal for her to have sex before marriage? She might feel differently about her privacy.
My young colleague’s response to my question may seem to support the broadly held view among market researchers that “millennials don’t care about privacy.” But a closer inspection of their values reveals a more complex picture. Members of the new generation are willing—even eager—to have their needs and behaviors revealed to the world, as long as they benefit from the exchange. But the next generation is among the most engaged in the increase in civil liberties, as evidenced by the high percentage of support for same-sex marriage. Meanwhile, they are among the most outraged when they learn that their civil liberties have been impinged upon. NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden, who as of this writing is still on the lam—ironically, in Moscow—exemplifies millennial values in action.
Total connectivity is indeed convenient, increasingly essential, and arguably addictive. Opting out is difficult. Peer-to-peer networks don’t yet offer sufficient coverage. And so we choose to give up our privacy every day. But it’s an uneasy deal. Should our personal information be used against us the tide may turn, leading to a wholesale rejection of traditional networks in favor of here today, gone tomorrow peer-to-peer solutions. Snapchat could be a harbinger of an embrace of personal privacy. But an older generation’s mistrust of the system might be the catalyst needed to lead the charge if we want to avert a systemic breach of personal privacy. It’s in business’s (and everyone’s) best interests to maintain identity management codes of conduct that put the human, and not the corporation, first.
Nanotechnology
Moore’s Law—which forecasts the consistent miniaturization of computing power—has held relatively steady for more than forty years. How much smaller (read: invisible) can technology get? Circuitry can already be built at the molecular scale. We’re blurring the boundaries between nature and technology. Some would argue that those boundaries have already dissolved. When technology—particularly sensor technology—can be embedded in everything and everyone, what type of world will we have created? A techno-paradise of interconnected data feeds? An overdependence on technological connectivity such that when something breaks or is hacked, we’re unable to function? And when it’s embedded in us, will we still be human? Or will we be superhuman?
The Sensor Revolution
Sensors are the basis of the next massive wave of innovation. But sensors are not new—their connectedness is. As I’ve often said in my keynote speeches about the future of smartphones, the lens is not just for taking pictures. It’s an eye that sees where you are, who you are with, the weather, the light levels, the traffic. And the microphone doesn’t just transport your voice. It’s an ear that can sense all aural information about your context.
But these were just the beginning. Next came GPS, which knows and broadcasts our location. Just as our own five senses (or six, depending upon what you believe) help us understand and navigate our world, sensors will help businesses and governments understand and navigate us. Because we are about to inhabit an everyday environment of proliferating and interconnected sensors. They will fill our homes, sit in our pockets, wrap around our wrists, be embedded in our shoes, pepper the inside and outside of our cars. Indeed, the under-construction Internet of Things is largely being built out of them. They open up almost unimaginable possibilities for new types of contextual experiences, both wondrous and dark. Because it means that everything you do is trackable and knowable. Including your personal biology.
The Quantified Self
Today, you choose your mobile device because its platform supports your favorite apps, because it has a good camera, because it integrates effortlessly with your other tech gear. But in the very near future, we will be choosing our mobile device because it’s the one that helps us stay healthier and live longer. Mobiles will monitor and help us improve our biological condition. Today’s tech R&D agendas, hiring briefs, and acquisition and patent portfolios point clearly to the quantified self as a major source of future innovation.
Wearables like Nike’s FuelBand or Jawbone’s UP24 already record and upload information that indicates our fitness levels and more into the cloud, and encourage us to exercise more or more effectively across multiple devices. These are benign and even highly appealing use cases of sensor technology.
Meanwhile, economic strain on health providers will force many aspects of the health-care system to be digitized, mobilized, and virtualized. For example, today many diagnostic detection processes are chemical—in other words, a sample of your pee or your blood needs to have a chemical additive in order to identify markers of a particular condition. But increasingly, detection systems are being developed that are optical. These innovations will decrease the reliance on—and cost of—physical labs, and make accurate virtual diagnosis possible. Already there are virtual diagnosis technologies in development for optically identifiable diseases like melanoma. In the future, they’ll be deployed to monitor markers like blood sugar levels.
But these remarkable technologies are by their nature connected. And they’ll detect things we may not want shared. The quantified self will mean that we are all utterly naked. Every heartbeat will be recorded and saved in the cloud. When and where we ate, drank, and even, according to an investor in this technology whom I recently spoke with, when and where we last orgasmed. (By detecting highly specific heart-rate patterns and circulatory fluctuations, in case you’re curious.)
You can go ahead and chuckle at that, unless you live in a place where the restrictions of Ramadan are strictly enforced. The dilemmas of the quantified self are serious. What if, for example, a mobile sensor detected your probability of developing a particular cancer. Could that probability be characterized as a pre-existing condition? At the time of this writing, legally, according to HIPAA laws in the United States, a patient cannot be denied health-care coverage due to a preexisting condition. But if a patient doesn’t disclose what they know about their health, they will be denied coverage, which demonstrates that insurance companies do have a right to know something. How much? And what about in the rest of the world? Today’s laws and ethical norms—not to mention health-care and insurance business models—weren’t developed in the context of such detailed biometric information and the probabilities that information depicts, which will soon be readily available.
Citizen Amateurs
The easy express-and-broadcast capabilities of the web—and particularly its mobile accessibility—has created a wave of amateurization across every discipline. On the surface of things, this is wondrous and liberating. But it has a dark side, too.
Let’s look at journalism, which has been profoundly affected by this trend. Newspapers, in their struggle for a sustainable business model now that the classifieds business is long dead, can barely support proper investigative journalism anymore. The discipline has been replaced by a constant stream of tweets, pictures, personal opinions, reasonably informed blogs, YouTube videos, and other “democratically” sourced content—remixed by the reader on Flipboard or the personalized aggregator of his choice. Again, on the surface, this seems benign. Everyone gets a voice. What’s wrong with that?
On the other hand, investigative journalism is a skill that requires fine-tuning over the years. Investigative journalism—which the good old newspapers like The Philadelphia Inquirer were built upon and lauded for—is, according to its former editor Robert Rosenthal, who’s now the executive director of a Bay Area nonprofit called the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR), “the lifeblood of democracy.” It’s about getting to the tough story, getting behind the walls and under the floors, uncovering what’s invisible, and shining fresh light on what’s often dark. Proper and professional journalism plays a crucial role in a free society, which is why freedom of the press is sacred in cultures that value personal liberty. Even if well-intentioned, “most amateurs,” CIR’s Rosenthal told me over coffee in his appropriately noir-ish windowless office, “don’t have the training, the reporting skills to really investigate.”
For a new generation, the voices and images of amateurs are perceived as having equal validity to those of the professionals. But generally, the amateurs only share what’s right in front of them or what’s in their minds. There’s been much celebration (outside of the traditional media brands, that is) of the “democratization” of journalism. So here’s a seemingly disconnected but relevant question: Would you prefer your kids’ health in the hands of “citizen health providers” or a trained pediatrician?
Career Transience
The days of the corporate insider rising to the top may well be numbered, because in the foreseeable future, a talented stable of insiders will be an endangered species. The next generation expects no loyalty from employers, and will likely work not only for multiple employers but through multiple careers in their working life. If they believe they can even get work. Years of mass unemployment in markets like Spain have left a generation feeling cynical about corporate participation, reliant on social services for their very existence, yet highly informed, as many have spent their workless time educating themselves.
The uncertainty that millennials face has given birth to deeply felt motivations that stand in stark contrast to the type of employee motivations that drove business growth for the past few decades. Although many are self-directed and ambitious, they are also used to being financially reliant on others (parents, friends, the government). They will work for you, if you prove to them what’s in it for them. It’s unlikely that the most talented will stick around if they spot a new opportunity. Not only because their attention spans are shorter (which is true, and a factor), but because they don’t place their trust in the stability of employment. They trust themselves.
One of the offshoots of constant instability and the realization among young people that they are unlikely to have continuous, stable, and lucrative employment is a desire to find work that’s meaningful. Sherilyn Shackell, an executive recruiter and marketing educator in London, recently told me that she thinks that meaningful organizations will be “the next talent drain.” When I asked her what she meant by this, she said, “A few years ago, everyone wanted to join a tech start-up. Today, I’m seeing people compete even harder for less-lucrative roles but in socially impactful organizations. They want to feel like all the time they’re spending is doing something good for someone else. Work is life, and they want life to be meaningful.”
How-ism
People also look for meaning in the things that they buy, not just how they spend their time. And because of the easy availability of information, people are increasingly coming to understand that every product made or grown is not only comprised of its materiality, but of processes. How and where a product or service or foodstuff was produced matters more to people than ever before, because it’s on the radar screen.
A proliferation of certifications and labels like free range, cruelty free, slavery free, organic, conflict-free, Rainforest Alliance Certified, Fair Trade Certified, and more signify the increasing attention given to the way a product or food was produced. Although such signifiers began as a means of addressing the demands of a niche segment of the population, the cohort choosing products based upon these certifications is rapidly growing and increasingly loyal. Consumers prefer to buy from companies they trust, and people-friendly, healthy, and safe production processes are the surest sign of trustworthiness. Meanwhile, concepts like “carbon footprints” and “food miles” have become mainstream standards for discussing and improving the social and ecological impact of business. Even the political biases and donations of corporate executives factor into the should-I-buy-it equation.
Neo-Anticapitalism
A new generation’s wholesale rejection of the basic principles of capitalism as we know it looms as a very real possibility. Just ask your kids what they think. For example, the Occupy movement is more than a fringe group that resents executive success. It is the most vocal and visible expression of a broad dissatisfaction with an all-too-real and growing wealth gap between the top and the bottom segments of society.
We can make all the arguments we want about the motivating power of an unregulated free market. We can explain why unregulated compensation for top talent is utterly fair as one of the free market’s core ingredients. I myself am uncomfortable with the whole notion of “equality” as an aspiration when it comes to compensation, or anything other than human civil rights. Fairness, however, is a different story. Even so, make no mistake: the argument for the performance-motivating power of unfettered financial compensation won’t be heard, because mass resentment is real, and it’s growing. Making it onto the presidential agenda in the form of the income inequality debate has given this dissatisfaction the stamp of legitimacy.
Though many might welcome it, it’s unlikely we’ll experience the drama of a French Revolution-style class upheaval. No, the new guillotines will have gentler blades, but the cuts could be just as fatal. Perhaps it will take the form of a gradual wind-down of consumer spending (after all, they’ll have less money) in favor of an increase in sharing and self-producing. To the extent that they can, many are already creating new systems of self-sufficiency that they perceive to be more just and fair. The good news is, there will be global businesses that will thrive by helping the dissatisfied masses do just this.
Alternative Currencies
One response to the global financial system is the establishment of alternative currency. Bitcoin is just the beginning. Actually, some say that shopper loyalty points and frequent flier miles were the original alternative currencies. No matter. The point is that the currencies we all know and use have a very different meaning to a new generation who take hacking, making, and manipulating data for granted. After all, money is data too. The noise level around the very utility of money itself is rising, as is, I should mention, questions about the utility of capitalism itself. To many readers, this will sound extreme, and extremist. Don’t close the book. Because who would have thought that The Matrix-style peer-to-peer currency created by a shadowy network of hackers would have been discussed seriously by the global elite at Davos? That scenario is already in the public record.
New Crimes
Surprising as it may seem, physical crime as a whole is going down dramatically in major cities around the world. But new forms of cyber crime are on the rise, both in actuality and in the public mind. As we become ever more dependent on connected data, the value of that data grows higher and more worthy of theft. Identity theft is expensive. Intellectual property theft is business threatening. Holding entire communities or businesses hostage to a hacked energy grid, hijacking driverless transport, holding up supply-and-demand chains by intercepting data flows—these and more are potential scenarios for organized crime syndicates to siphon value out of a virtualized financial network. Data encryption remains a vital domain for robust and continuous innovation.
The Crossroads
Each one of these change drivers, when considered on its own, is significant. But merged together, they form a whole greater than the sum of its parts. If we were to simply let things run their course, without addressing how we, as an interdependent community of human beings, want our world, our lives, and our businesses to be for our children and our successors, things might not turn out to be so life enhancing for all.
It’s not hard to imagine how it could all go. Imagine a world without individual privacy, where everything about us—our thoughts, expressions, and biology—is connected and knowable by friends and enemies alike, creating new healthy haves and healthless have-nots as well as new forms of untraceable and total identity theft and trade. A world where real-world currencies compete with decentralized forms of exchange that are more appealing to a generation with less opportunity to earn. Where climate change threatens to put our greatest financial centers literally underwater, not to mention scores of human lives, while simultaneously and ironically water shortages cause uprisings of conflict that play out far beyond their geographic place of origin. Where your intellectual property and your talent are impossible to protect from the reaching grasp of your competition. Imagine a world where an increasingly strained health-care system results in the slowdown of life expectancy gains and puts ever greater pressure on public coffers. Where robots raise and teach our kids, if they haven’t yet taken our jobs or started governing us. Where masses of frustrated and connected citizens demand greater regulation of big business from their governments even as those governments are fragmenting into smaller and smaller communities of interest. Where there are imposed limits on compensation as well as business growth. Where people stop using banks or participating in broader economic value creation but instead make and trade peer to peer. Imagine a world where mob opinion takes over from fact and truth. The list could go on. It’s not sci-fi. It’s possible.
However, an alternative and happier future is far more likely, because it too is possible. More people are more aware of the impact that our actions—and particularly the actions of large and powerful organizations—have on human life and continuity. A digitally empowered society will decide how we want all this to play out. We know it wouldn’t be sensible to simply let our humanity and our planet go. Because we’re social by nature, humans have a tendency, in the end, to make life better for one another, not worse. We’ve never had a better opportunity to do just that on a mass scale than we do right now. And thanks to the unstoppable conflux, it’s never been more urgent.
As individuals, we may be tempted to just let things run their course. It’s natural to not want to face what’s right in front of us. But businesses—and business leaders—cannot afford to turn away from the conflux and assume that things will continue as usual. The wisest and most effective competitive and growth strategies will engage directly in all or most of the discussed change drivers. They are already impacting your business whether you have begun to acknowledge it or not. The co-founder and former editor of Wired magazine, Louis Rossetto, used to keep a Post-it note on his computer at all times. It said, “deal with change before change deals with you.”
So what’s a business to do?
Adapting to change is hard. It takes strong motivation to commit to making operational and cultural adjustments both great and small. The drive to overcome inertia and make the necessary changes can be sparked by embedding future-friendly awareness across the organization. Everyone needs a regular wake-up call. By personally confronting the changes that our businesses, and their functions, are facing, we absorb these changes more deeply, and they start to inform the strategic and operational decisions we make regularly. It’s not enough to simply be told. We need to see where we’re going ourselves. The firsthand experience of envisioning our own future is simply more catalytic than reading it in a memo or report.
It’s a wise habit for all leaders to be personally conversant in at least the basics of techno-social and behavioral foresight. Indeed, in a world that’s shifting so quickly, a bit of insight and foresight needs to be part of every manager’s job. Like feeling the effect of weather conditions on the road on which we’re driving, we need to personally engage the sometimes almost invisible, sometimes seemingly faraway forces that are in fact impacting what we do in the here and now.
I’ve heard the push backs. “But we need to address declining sales today. We don’t have the luxury of time for star-gazing or intellectual stuff,” thinks the prototypical and hyper-focused head of sales. “This is why we have a strategy department, and why they hire a consultancy. I don’t have time to think about anything but my team. When we get a break, maybe we can talk about the future.” These are understandable sentiments. Indeed, the real-time demands of the present moment can make talking about the future seem like a luxury. But everything I have described in the list of driving forces above is happening now. We’re all on the trajectory. And there are knowledge gaps to fill, as quickly as possible. We all need to know the world in which we’re operating. Most of us know and operate in our own vision of the world, and in our own business’s vision of the world. It’s surprisingly easy for management to become myopic, even in (and in some ways, especially in) the technology sector. Even seemingly unstoppable tech giants are vulnerable to imminent irrelevance. Remember when the Internet meant AOL?
Knowledge is power. Foresight is superpower. And the good news is, it’s also very easy to expand and extend your own—and your team’s—scope of vision, and harness the superpower of foresight in everyday decisions. And what’s more, it’s fascinating and engaging. It sparks conversations, enlivens meetings, provokes new solutions. It’s not a challenging muscle to develop. But it is a different muscle than the one most leaders use every day. You simply need to build your own change-driver telescope.
Build Your Telescope
As a brand strategist and business innovation guy, it has long been my job to peer into the near future and get a bead on what’s coming next. Some called this skill “understanding emergence.” And I’ll tell you something: it’s easy, once you give yourself the creative permission to do it. The first step is acknowledging that it’s an essential part of your job.
To see what’s emerging we simply do this: synthesize our own observations with our own finely honed intuition. We look at what’s around us, every day, with an open mind, without assumptions. What are people doing in their cars, on the bus, at the coffee shop? We look for aspects of everyday life and media that somehow stand out—fast-spreading social media memes, news articles, shops, consumer products, new kinds of services—that stand out. And we look for patterns. Clusters of similar circumstances, sentiments, or entities. When we spot something that is difficult or unlikely, or doesn’t follow a traditional business logic but begins to unfold anyway, it’s a sign that we should take notice.
The “telescope” I use includes a range of activities. I don’t just read the media, I scan it regularly for new phenomena and emergent popular ideas. I also consult oracles—my sexy description of talking to experts and thought leaders about what they think and see. Over the years, as these activities have become a habit, I’ve learned to recognize patterns in behavior and ideas, just as you will. There are “early warning signs” when a new trend or phenomenon is taking hold. Often, a trend has an epicenter, and I assess whether the trend is exportable to new contexts and cultures or business categories.
The web makes this easy to access, though potentially overwhelming. From TED Talks to Wired online to a proliferation of blogs, there’s so much out there. So start with the change drivers listed in this chapter. Choose a few—make sure there’s at least one that excites you and at least one that really bothers you—and spend a few minutes discovering more about them online. Do not have your assistant do this for you. Your own discovery is what will embed foresight into your managerial thinking. Save some bookmarks in your browser. Keep a small list in your notebook. The object: make surveying emergent change drivers as much a habit as checking the share prices.
There are four key principles to put in play as you build and use your telescope.
1. Self-source it. You do the discovering. Reading a deck of slides that someone else put together for you just doesn’t work. You’ll quickly forget—if you read them at all. You and your team have to identify emerging change drivers yourselves. In other words, don’t just outsource your future vision to the innovation department. It’s most effective to have a felt experience of the possibilities of change.
2. Make it relevant. It’s wise to start by identifying change drivers from outside your business space; you must establish their relevance—whether direct or indirect—to your business ecosystem. Next, you nail the relevance link. Briefly verbalize why this matters for your business. Keep it simple. Just two things. How is this change driver—or better yet, try a mash-up of several change drivers—good for your business, and how is it bad for your business?
3. Invite your team to participate. Get everyone on your team thinking about change drivers on a regular basis. Have each team member “own” a particular change driver, assign a monthly wake-up call champion, or let it happen organically. Incentivize people to come up with the most insightful and relevant observations. Use the context of change drivers in creative brainstorms, even those about internal processes and operational challenges.
4. Build it into everyday work. Begin every meeting—and I’m not using the word “every” lightly—from the outside in. Put a “wake-up call”—a review of change drivers and their impact, both positive and negative, on your business—into every agenda, from the board meeting to the Monday departmental get-together. Encourage everyone to contribute his own foresight. Make it part of the regular conversation.
By making the wake-up call part of your regular work, you are in effect reconditioning yourself and your company culture so that it perpetually faces forward, rather than inward or backward. This exercise keeps your mind limber. It keeps your team stimulated and motivated to be agile. Because when it’s time to innovate and harness the mass movement for good, everyone knows the answer to the biggest question of all, which is always “why?”
Your customers are waking up. Your employees are waking up. Your suppliers are too, and the communities in which you operate. The conflux has opened our eyes, and in our broad and bright awakening, a new culture, a Culture of Conscience, is emerging.