It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change, according to Charles Darwin.
The rate of change in today's world is unbelievably fast and is getting faster. Like it or not, we are in the second industrial revolution * or the 3rd age of computing ** (1. Mainframes & minis -> 2. Microsoft -> 3. Google) . Many organisations today find themselves suddenly stuck in a foreign environment, some don't even realise the environment had changed. Those in denial pretend it's still the same. Eddie Obeng from Ted calls it the world after midnight.
The reason organisations get trapped, is due to collective intellectual inertia and a natural human trait to resist change. This collectively leads to evolutionary inertia of the organisation itself. The result of that, may not be pretty.
Look at what happened to Kodak, Borders and Classifieds. They all thought that their competitors were operating in a different "suburb" but not recognizing in reality, that their competitors were operating inside their own backyard. Naturally, the "old" paradigm organisations get consumed by extinction events, in a way, of their own making. To rub salt to the decay, they had the best financials, brains, brand equity and reach.
In essence, the real customers are not the customers; the real customers are thecustomers' needs!
The true survivors are thriving because their minds are open, and they are either following closely or leading as trail blazers / front runners. They are remaking the status quo, re-shaping reality. This new force is real, huge and it is here; and is not to be underestimated.
To frame this in simple terms, there are 4 distinct levels that a organisation can be in, and this is an over simplification, just to illustrate the point.
Level 0 (Denial): Analogy - The house is in a mess, it's chaotic, some even claim that it's random, but no, it's just chaotic. The occupants don't care what's happening outside, whether a big storm is coming . . doesn't even know if the house can withstand it or electricity will be cut off. Because everything worked fine and is assumed to continue to work fine, because if it aint broke, don't fix it (haven't we heard of that before).
Chaos is relative. It's relative to the current status quo. So using the analogy, a seemingly well kept house, can considered chaotic if standards have changed, benchmarks morphed and paradigms shifted.
However, some cases are outright simple. Examples of level zero attributes are (and not limited it), tired / protected monopolies, office politics dominating over teamwork and collaboration / job at hand, the person who shouts the loudest wins, sales and marketing resting on their laurels (unaware of changes in consumer behaviors or competitors), dis-energised teams, buddy vendor relationships with no SLA (let alone good SLA), favoritism & nepotism, work process flows that depends on who's in charge and the weather (instead of focusing on customer value chains), documentation for documentation sake, organisational knowledge which is present but cannot be easily found, silos, warlords & factions, tired / non leadership, tall organisations.
Level 1(Knowledge): Analogy - Spring cleaning has just completed, we know where things are, now what? The house occupants start to, "come out", find out what's happening in the neighborhood, checks the weather forecast.
Basics are done right. The organisation kind of knows there could be a need for change. Starts to find out about what's happening. Major learning and fact finding happens. Understanding the real current status quo and learning profusely, reading trajectories. The quality of reading of trajectory will depend on the quality of leadership at hand.
This is the preparation stage to level 2.
Level 2 (Action): Analogy - key members of the family come back, sits down on the dinner table, "hey everyone, there's something going on, and we need to do something", discusses plans for the future.
Marketing & sales adapts to current reality outside and is leading the pack in the immediate competition pool / paradigm.
New levels of cooperation / melding, between profit centers and cost centers / support - the new model for survival is IT literate business folk (the hunters) work closely with business literate IT folks (their wives, just an analogy .. please don't pin me on this)
Internally, organisation are adopting Waterfall-Agile hybrid situation-based project management, starts to mine Big Data (passive mining, active analysis), a significant chunk or IT function potentially outsourced (of course best performing workers negotiated to transition), Lean & Kanban, service performance / vendor management comes to the fore, strategic teams re-evaluate Porter's value chain & strategy concepts and understands what Philip Evans is trying to say in his recent BCG speech and Jeremy Rifkin from BigThink, embrace new information channels like gigaom/99U/Ted, etc
This leads to preparations for level 3, if there is drive and will for it. Depends on the achievement hunger index (AHI) in the corporation. Just coined AHI out of thin air.
Level 3 (Trail blazing): Analogy - there is no strict analogy for this because this is a new area, it is the exciting unknown (e.g. probably build a new house based on exoskeleton concept (instead of the reverse which is today's mindset, skeleton on the inside) and replace bricks with 3-d woven carbon fiber reinforced polypropylene?)
Conquerors - awaken the giant / barbarian within. Paradigm busters, people who create new markets, disrupters, the ones that took calculated risks and come home with gold and riches.
Why refine existing processes if technology is available for us to change the rules? Competitors who get it (the Social Mobile Analytics Cloud - SMAC stack rules) may just take measured risks, change the rules and fire a BEEM (Business Extinction Event Missile) on your business strategy!
Explore new uses for basic 21st century enabling technologies and it's ensuing paradigm, employing satellites (it's cheaper than we think) for preventative fire fighting (also, pre-crime surveying for fire bugs), new RFID + sensor-transducer applications (infinite possibilities, limited by our team's creativity) for livestock management, crop and fertilizer management, supply chain, robo-infantry applications, domestic applications, robosourcing (the new outsourcing) - automation of service delivery, proactive big data strategies - info bots to actively mine for information (active analytics), market realisation and application of new materials (aerogels, graphene), market realisation of new energy harvesting and storage technology (perovskite solar cell printing, zero inertia horizontal micro-wind turbines in every home (hidden like barnacles when there is no air movement but pops up when the slightest breeze is detected), lithium air batteries seconded by magnesium zinc & vanadium redox units), true competition between renewables and role reduction of fossil fuels into limited backup / standby, engineered foods revolution (e.g. vegetarian food engineered to be more nutritious than meats and more tasty than meat), tidal water turbine revolution, dogecoin embrace, etc.
In fact, many a time, new creative thinking doesn't even need new technology, for example the mega bus concept which is being mooted to solve public transportation challenges in China. When creativity is concerned, I think it is only limited by our minds...
In short . . .
Level 0 organisations are at highest risk for extinction or sudden death ("extinction event" as Malcolm Frank's team from Cognizant calls it). People will be "shocked" and go home to break the news "honey, i don't know where next month's mortgage payment is going to come from, I'm sorry". Sorry is not an option.
Level 1 organisation, if they are not careful may fall into level 0. If there is new blood or realisation of where the world is heading, prepares the organisation for Level 2, rallies the people, harnesses entropy into usable energy for forward motion.
Level 2 organisations starts to feel the energy of life, they either try to maintain pace or choose to be the trail blazers in Level 3, depending on the DNA or their leadership team . . and their capability to motivate the internals and push the external envelope.
As for Level 3, Alan Kay sums it up well "The best way to predict the future is to invent it". In today's world, those who innovate to change the rules, can devour those who innovate just to compete on status quo. This is an era where true innovators will rule, and it is wise to heed Michelangelo's advice as well that the greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it.
So there goes my blog, and thinking about this new world we are in, which woke me at at bloody 6am and had blood gushing in my tired brains that prevented me from sleeping, so that I can write this blog. It's now 8.26am and I will be late for work if I don't stop.
Blog by KK Ong
Make the future or be overtaken by it
The present is already past the moment you think about it
Find me at http://au.linkedin.com/in/okkaddress
* ‘The Second Machine Age,’ by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee
** http://www.skrenta.com/2007/01/winnertakeall_google_and_the_t.html
Consolidatory reading, powerful speeches by Prof Eddie Obeng:
Over a million views on Ted.com
http://www.ted.com/talks/eddie_obeng_smart_failure_for_a_fast_changing_world
