When convenience trumps trust
Is trust in a legacy brand worth more to customers than the service and convenience of a more agile market entrant? Rarely.
Read MoreFriction starts fires, but ambition changes worlds
A year ago this week I was delivering the keynote speech at the Future Money conference in London. Next week I will be delivering a talk at Fintech North as part of Leeds Digital Festival.
In between the two events my attitude to the coming transformations has become significantly more cautious. Not pessimistic, as suggested by F6S/tech.eu’s Jon Bradford, but concerned that the opportunity is so great that it cannot possibly be fulfilled.
The risk, and the fear, come from the fact that the opportunity is not purely commercial, it is social.
A year ago I spoke about the various frictions in the financial system that were the ignition points for new innovation: the speed and cost of moving money and taking payments; a lack of trust in the big banks. Today more friction points are being exposed and exploited all the time, driving the fintech boom.
But each new innovation seems to be an incremental improvement. A profitable sliver shaved off the giant banks, while the core remains unchanged. As Chris Gledhill, one of the other speakers at Future Money, put it when he left Lloyds to found Secco: “Even outside [the banks], the FinTech communities are innovating around existing financial protocols — making them cheaper, faster, better. They’re not trying to actually reinvent these things.”
What we have with the advent of technologies like the blockchain and its derivatives is an opportunity to reinvent the very structure of our financial system. The balance of power. The centralised nature. Not just to eliminate friction but to embed greater fairness.
This might sound like socialist moralising but really it should appeal to anyone of an entrepreneurial nature. By lowering friction but also redistributing power we can create a much more open marketplace. New platforms for innovation but also lower barriers to raising money, and collecting it from customers. Simpler access to new markets, nationally and internationally.
I am hugely hopeful that our financial system two decades from now looks radically different to how it does today. More open. More distributed. Lower cost and lower friction.
Will that come from individual innovations? Or does it require someone with a larger vision?
I’m not sure.
So I remain hopeful, but cautious.
The Unbeatable Bandwidth of Being There
No technological medium, however powerful, can yet match the unbeatable bandwidth of being there and experiencing something with all your senses.
Read MoreInoculate yourself against fraud
Last week I was the target of the infamous ‘Windows tech support’ scam. It wasn’t the first time.
If you’re not familiar with this hustle, it typically starts with a call on your landline from an Indian call centre. The person at the other end tells you they are from Microsoft and that they have been monitoring your PC, and that it is infected with a virus of some description. In order to convince you they then walk you through opening up the Event Viewer, an administration tool, in order to show you a series of errors and warnings.
In reality these errors and warnings are completely harmless, but many people are convinced and subsequently talked into installing a remote access tool which then provides the scammers with access to their PC for real, ostensibly so that they can ‘fix’ the problem.
From there it’s all down hill: charges, extortion, malware etc.
Now I knew it was a scam from the start. Even if I’d never read about the scam before I got the first call, I would have known it for what it was.
Why?
You could say it’s just down to experience. That technology has been a major part of my career and even before that I was mucking around with machines from a very early age. I understood what I was being shown and what it meant.
But actually the understanding that this was a scam came much earlier in the call than the point at which the caller directed me to the event log. I knew the moment they said they were from Microsoft and that they had been monitoring my machine.
A few things gave it away. The terrible quality of the phone line for one. But even more than that, I knew Microsoft would not be monitoring my machine in this way. I knew they couldn’t staff a call centre with people to remotely monitor and manage users problems without some explicit contract. Both to address the cost of doing so, and the privacy issues it would raise.
None of this was particularly conscious. It was just that my sceptical spider-sense started buzzing.
I don’t think this instinctive scepticism is solely the domain of the geeky. I believe it can probably be taught. And doing so is one of the key parts of solving some of technology’s major security challenges.
Most of the security threats that we face, at home or at work, still require some form of human co-operation, willing or unwilling. Clicking on a dodgy email or link. Installing an insufficiently-checked app.
A healthier level of trained scepticism would prevent much of this behaviour.
How do we teach scepticism like this? I’ll cover that in my next post.
TEDxManchester: You Are All Bionic Now
I gave the opening talk at TEDxManchester yesterday. It was a cracking event with a great range of speakers, covering everything from parenting in war zones, to freestyle dance, to online dating and musical coding.
Normally when I do a talk like TEDx I post my full script afterwards. But the reality is that my script for this talk ended up quite some way from the words I actually said. In this case the script was really just the bones of a talk against which I planned the slide deck. What I actually said when I got on stage added a lot more detail that only really fell into place during the couple of days before.
So rather than posting my script to accompany the slide deck, I thought I’d post a summary and a few interesting quotes from my research material. You can see the full slide deck here: TEDxManchester — You Are All Bionic Now
Navigate with arrow keys (or just scroll on devices that don’t support the javascript behind it). And read on for the thoughts behind it.
We Are All Bionic Now
The central argument of my talk was that we are all bionic now. All cyborgs enhanced by the power of pocket and remote computers to which we have happily outsourced the augmentation of our mental functions. Satnav for our sense of direction. Shared photo and video stores for memories. Calendars and digital assistants. Search engines increasing our knowledge and aiding our recall.
Because our mental image of a cyborg has been defined as the direct interface of man and machine at a physical level — the Terminator, the CyberMen, the Borg — we have missed the fact that technology has overcome the issues that obliged this physical melding when the term ‘cyborg’ was first created back in the Cold War. We now have very high performance interfaces to and between our machines. Not only can they accept rich data from a range of inputs, but they can use their processing power to make assumptions to fill in the blanks. And when they need more power they can access it on demand over fast Internet connections.
Today you no longer need to have a chip in your head or your brain directly connected to mechanical body parts in order to be a cyborg.
And that’s good because the challenges we are facing now are very different to the ones that scientists faced back in the Cold War. In a stable, developed economy like the UK our challenges are much more mental than physical. The places we need augmentation are not primarily in lifting heavy objects or surviving harsh extra-terrestrial environments. Or for that matter, war zones (though this issue drives the continued research of more physical cyborg applications).
We use our cyborg powers today to filter the morass of content that comes our way. To navigate a world that is changing ever faster. And to inform and enrich ourselves with knowledge and media, for pleasure or to help us tackle the challenges of our work.
The next step is for portions of our personality to break off from the physical whole and become semi-autonomous in the cloud and in other devices. In a total reverse of the original idea of a human brain in a robot body, fragments of human thoughts, experiences, preferences and needs will be encapsulated in code and allowed to roam across the Internet doing our bidding.
A limited micro-clone of you will be in your self-driving car, remembering your address, preferences and even preferred driving style.
Another micro-clone will handle mundane shopping tasks, ensuring that not only do you never run out of toilet paper, but that when your preferred brand isn’t available you get the next best thing based on an understanding of you.
Perhaps there should have been a moral debate about whether we want to be cyborgs. But the reality is that we are now. The question we have to address is how far we want it to go. And what we will all do with our cyborg powers.
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Research
I found these excerpts from academic papers/books looking at the subject of cyborgs really useful — and fascinating,
“The use of the term ‘cyborg ‘ to describe a human-machine amalgam originated during the Cold War. It was coined by Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline in Astronautics (1960) for their imagined man-machine bybrid who could survive in extraterrestrial environments. NASA, which needed an enhanced man for space exploration, sponsored their work. According to the original conception, the cybernetic organisms would remain human in a Cartesian sense; their bodies (like machines) would be altered, whilst their minds could continue their scientific research.”
TechnoFeminism, By Judy Wajcman 2004
“By including gender [in the Turing Test], Turing implied that renegotiating the boundary between human and machine would involve more than transforming the question of “who can think” into “what can think”. It would also necessarily bring into question other characteristics of the liberal subject, for it made the crucial move of distinguishing between the enacted body, present in the flesh on one side of the computer screen, and the represented body, produced through the verbal and semiotic markers constituting it in an in electronic environment. This construction necessarily makes the subject into a cyborg, for the enacted and represented bodies are brought into conjunction through the technology that connects them.”
How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics, N Katherine Hayles, 1999
“I believe that these figures embody the libidinal-political dynamics of the consumerist ethos to which young peoplehave been systematically habituated during the contemporary period. …the Cyborg has incorporated the machineries of consumption into its juvenescent flesh.”
Rob Latham, Consuming Youth: Vampires, Cyborgs and the Culture of Consumption, 2002
Why risk is greatest when you’re happy and profitable
Do you run a happy ship? Does everyone in your organisation sing from the same hymn sheet? Are you all aligned to the same goals? Do these happy staff stay with you for years and years?
Then you’re probably in trouble. Because experience has taught me that these characteristics are often the precursors to a fall.
I’ll explain.
There are two types of organisation that typically call me up for consulting engagements. A small number get in touch when they’re doing well and they want to identify the next opportunity. The majority call me when things are not going so well and they’re looking to get back on track with some insight into where their market or sector is going.
These latter organisations often have much in common. When you interview the management and staff, you find a number of key characteristics:
- Until recently. the organisation has been profitable for a long time — often growing (or in the public sector, funded with a manageable amount of cash, year on year)
- People stay with the organisation a long time — more than seven years — and often trained with that company
- Staff are totally sold on the company message. Apart from the usual gripes (IT, inter-departmental communication, their boss) you hear the same story about the company and the market from everyone
In these circumstances, something happens. Or rather it doesn’t. People don’t ask hard questions. Because they don’t want to risk the comfort of the warm bath they’re in. And because with so little exposure to what’s going on outside, they don’t know which questions to ask.
If you run an organisation that sounds like this one, get help. Bring in someone with a fresh pair of eyes. Get them to take a good, hard, critical look. Listen to what they come back with, and act on it.
Crucially, don’t let this analyst stay involved too long. Six months at most. Longer than that and they will be infected by the good will and happiness. They will lose objectivity and start to believe things like “that won’t affect us” or “that doesn’t work in this market.”
Once this analyst has done your diagnosis and made a prescription, bring in other people to help you make the change. Specialists in people, technology and transformation.
Six months later, bring your analyst back and tell them to look again. Don’t be surprised if they raise new criticisms.
Repeat the process.
In this environment, the only way you keep your organisation happy and profitable, is through constant evolution.
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Need an analyst to help you see the darkness in your bright and shiny world? You need an Applied Futurist.
Get in touch and we can help you directly, or introduce you to one of our growing number of partners nationwide.
In An Information Age, Knowledge isn’t Power, It’s a Commodity
When politicians talk about a ‘knowledge economy’, it sounds like information is gold. A durable good that can be stored and trickled out to the market to keep its value high.
It isn’t.
Just a decade ago it might have been true. If you came up with a new product, process or business model, you probably had a few years grace before it was replicated. With the wind behind you, you could create a defensible position, for a while at least.
Technology has changed this.
Knowledge isn’t durable like gold. It’s a fast moving consumer good. A low-value, high-volume commodity. The power in knowledge today is not in holding it but managing its flow. Getting it into your business quickly, extracting its value, and moving on.
Most businesses don’t get this. And it’s not the leaders’ fault. We’ve spent years being conditioned into the idea that there is fundamental value at the heart of our businesses. That the way to improve them is to optimise what we do. Boost margins here. Squeeze costs there. Sell more. Charge more.
This is old thinking. Today, agility trumps optimisation.
The value at the heart of your business is constantly being eroded. The gold turned to lead. The power drained from the knowledge.
Technology has lowered the friction in the flow of information to the point where goods and ideas can flow much more easily. Between organisations and across borders.
Other people can do what you do. They can do it faster and cheaper. And do it in completely different ways through totally new channels. Threats can come from nowhere and become existential in a matter of months.
If you want to succeed and sustain in this fast-changing environment you have to make changes.
First, you need to make sure that you are exposed to the information that matters. That inside your market, and in adjacent or relevant markets, you are watching what is happening and taking that learning into your business. Listening to customers, listening to peers, looking for threats and opportunities around the corner. It’s too easy to run with your head down, focused on the challenges inside the walls of your own organisation.
Second, you need to ensure that information flows fast. From the customer, to the decision makers and back again. One of the first questions I ask new clients is about the length of this round trip. The real answer is often around 12 weeks. Too slow.
Ensure that you collect relevant data from your organisation. From customers, partners, departments and suppliers. Make sure that you share this information with the right people, in real time, with maximum clarity. No manual processing. No subcommittees and tiers of review where all meaning gets polished from the data.
Finally, make sure that you equip the people who matter with the power to respond. Take decisions yourself or push power to the edge. Enable people to act on the evidence that they see in a time frame that makes sense. Clue: that time frame is short.
Technology will help you to do some of these things. A well-designed customer interface. Integrated software systems. But these things only add value in a properly-structured organisation with the right behaviours.
Establishing those is much harder than signing a cheque for a new website or social media campaign.