Are you a faroid?

Futurist, foresight professional or faroid?

I spoke before about being a modern shift worker. It is not necessarily in shifts of 7.x hrs but rather in bits and pieces across the 24hr clock. What do we call that?

Things change in the way in which we live, often due to technologies. The fundamentals remain but how we do it changes. More precisely often technology evolution or revolution takes away previous hurdles and limitations.

Often in the foresight field we struggle with what to call new products, services, phenomena. How to name something very new? It has happened in human history many a time. Difference is futurists tend to live it over and over and have to deal with it in less than energised decision making situations.

As a corporate futurist one often has to present in 20minutes what tends to take the team months of work. That’s when you invariably hit the proverbial futurist wall, how do I bring these people up to speed in 20minutes on business concepts.  It is fun though when the presentation can be turned into a demo, but this is often where the funds run out….

If you want to see some cool about 20min presentations on interesting new things you should try this. It does not bring you quite to making a decision to invest or buy or even what for at times, but it works my imagination on those points.

The futures field struggles with the same issue of how we call ourselves. Some people call themselves futurists. That word has had its bad or strange connotations. Strategic foresight and so foresight professional is typically favored by those who work in applied futures and often in corporate or government contexts rather than as a freelancer, writing about it.

As things evolve and new understanding comes into play and one wishes to mark that somehow – a new word is often necessary to denote the changes. So how about faroid as the 21st century futurist/foresight professional?

Oh and the other new word I’d like to find – what do we call the modern shift worker – the person who works a bit early in the morning, then during the day and some more late at night or at times in the middle of the night? A liquid worker – a worquid?

Innovation variants – Nokia and Computer Sciences Corporation

Do you create waves or ride waves or both? Which one is relevant to your innovation program and why?

Speaking at the InnoFuture2007 in Melbourne, Australia, as a panel member on different takes to innovation from some key industries, I represented the ICTI [Information Communication Telecommunication and Internet industry].

This is roughly what I spoke about although you’ll miss the foxtrot steps I took and smiles shared between me and my audience. So as I don’t speak to notes, this is a slightly different take…

Technology and the regulatory climate shaped the ICT industry in the 1990s. Gordon Bell coined the term ICT at the time. The change was based on the de-regulatory moves, which allowed new entrants to the industry to carve out technology based, specialized, roles like cable TV network, utility network or mobile network.

Now the players of the broader industry are moving again. Internet did not really feature in the shift in the early 90s but now some fifteen years later technologies that made the Internet possible are the foundation for redefining the broader industry, with the ever increasing appetites for the next thing and with the ability to get there with ease .

This time the changes are based on the ALL-IPization of the networks and the applications leveraging the networks for telcos, media, services and enterprise. Standardization takes away previous hurdles for business connectivity, hence creating convergence in the broad industry landscape.

The ALL-IPization enables whole new ways to think about business innovation, process innovation, social networking in the enterprise.

It is about creating an innovation platform on which to build whole new businesses and models with smarts in the way in which the Enterprise change ‘layer one mash-up’ of voice, data and video is leveraged for the benefit of the network hangers on – things and people. The implementation of the next steps is still in its infancy with some examples in some core business areas like call centers.

The 90s smallish Internet bubble has gotten bigger and all players are shifting roles and stepping on each others toes in the process. And yet, we all recognize that no one can do it alone. So maybe it is just a gentle brush on the toes rather than stepping. The question is where does it all go?

ICTI is like an innovation avalanche coming your way. It does not matter which industry you are in and the ICTI industry will have an impact. Sometimes devastating impact. I don’t buy encyclopedias anymore, having trouble storing my books as it is, and I love books, to have and to hold.

The ICTI industry itself needs to rethink its definitions:

“Who am I in the scheme of things?”

“Innovation and foresight are important when things change fast.”

“M-hm and why is that? Shouldn’t I just be quick on my feet?”

“Oh yes, that too. If you are quick on your feet with everything that comes your way then you’ll be busy pandering to stuff that has nothing to do with where you could add value and differentiate. Your innovation and foresight programs need to figure out what it is that you wish to delight mankind with.”

Each industry is more inclined to innovate in a manner, which naturally suits the industry’s business model.

I have worked in two different types of innovation, foresight and product or service creation roles. One was with Nokia in the 90s for almost ten years and the other with Computer Sciences Corporation so far for almost five years. So I tell here a little story about both.

The approaches to innovation are very different. The differences have to do with the client type, the economic era, the political and other contexts, the portfolio, the ethos, the business model, the purchase decision speed, the position of the player in their segment, the maturity of the organization.

Nokia in the 90s is a different Nokia from the 00s and yet the same. CSC of the mid 00s is different from the CSC of the 90s and yet the same.

I can highlight some of the key differences in the innovation approaches by just discussing three elements: portfolio, context and ethos.

At Nokia [Mobile Phones] the output was, still is, a very identifiable product, produced in the millions for global consumption. The portfolio or output innovation context dimension can be described as “done and frozen”. This means that the product thinking happens some years before the product in out on the market. Once you pass a stage in the development cycle you should not mess with the foundations.

We did work hard on the personalization profiling in software and hardware and other areas but that’s for another day, much of the product still adheres to the done and frozen description.

The business context in the early 90s was danger, I call it “do or die“. The company, as well as the country Finland was in great difficulties due to the sudden loss of the Soviet Union business. Luckily Nokia had already identified the need to diversify to new markets but that was not enough. The context allowed for unabashed gung-ho approach to the growing and emerging mobile market. The early 90s atmosphere was fearless and the small number that we were was just busy getting it done.

The ethos – after the first successes with the 2110 – became “We shape things“.

At CSC, in the mid 00s, the same three dimensions are very different. The porfolio or output is living and tailored. This means that the services delivered have a varied finalization degree and once the service is established for the enterprise client the service keeps changing due to clients’ changing needs and also due to continuously changing means to deliver the services.

The context in the early to mid 00s has been caution in the enterprise world. Some of it has to do with the burst Internet bubble in 2001 and it led to economic decision making becoming more and more contracted in the enterprise for anything but the very basics. Do more with less is the client message, which will not go away in a hurry.

The innovation ethos at CSC is “We solve problems“. That is a good ethos when much of the ‘every day IT use’ technologies in the industry have not exactly been to the level of auto manufacturing standards. Beyond the basics of IT in the office use, CSC has always had a complex and demanding client base. In those environments there is a need for particular problem solving. More and more these problems are solved leveraging off-the-shelf technologies but still needing solutioneering beyond the initial technologies or problem statements.

Now IT services are rapidly moving to a new type of clientele, which is not IT savvy or interested and will walk away from it if it does not work. These are field workers who have not so far been in the true realm of IT services. I’ll get back to this mobile avalanche one in a later blog.

These different contexts lead to varied innovation responses.

At Nokia due to the done and frozen portfolio dimension we had to learn to understand the consumer, the buyer, before they did. You cannot ask a consumer what they’d like in three years’ time. They do not have the context, knowledge of the enabling technologies, or an organized sense of other changes occurring around them, at least not around your organizational goals.

Many companies did ask these types of questions in the 90s and maybe still do, in ‘future’ clever or less so focus group settings.

So in search of meaning in amongst the engineering ideas of what consumers might want in 3 years’ time, I led a small diverse team from fields of sociology, technology, business and design, from Finland, UK and US, to 30+ countries from which we collated insights and then translated those into product concepts. I devised a few different programs for better views on the future consumer or consumer foresight as I call it.

As an aside I have been looking for many years now a suitable word to use instead of consumer as it is too limiting in many contexts. People foresight, client foresight, human foresight, audience foresight. I always hated the word user [instead of client/audience] in the technology industry and lately I have heard it being referred to treating people as if they were using something quite different….

Better future needs understanding was one of the innovation responses but we also had to start communicating the future needs with more than just the Nokia decision making machinery and the operational machinery. We needed to take lots of ecosystem players there with us.

The operational changes were also significant allowing for the huge growth [while forecasts in the 90s where always slightly timid] as well as the global nature of the business. The design of the product had to allow for personalization as well as volume production. We spent much time on that one.

The organization fought really hard to keep a fresh open doors and flatness approach and yet naturally mature the operational tools to handle the global business in a streamlined fashion. I spent six months on a business leader program creating a values package to allow an easy introduction to the Nokia Way.

At CSC the clients vary from defense to auto manufacturing to utilities to health care to mobile manufacturing and anything in between. I identify the needs within the client as general needs, industry needs and specific needs and strategic needs.

The demands of the horizontal, vertical and client interface are different. There is a mixture of reactive and proactive needs for innovation. The behavior and models related to those two ends of the spectrum are very different.

CSC has many long running programs to assist clients understand the changing landscape in technologies and the impact these have on the business decision makers landscape. For example the Leading Edge Forum is one such program. CSC has also understood the importance of proactive service innovation and has a program for that called Global Service Offering program, which like the LEF is part of the Office of Innovation and is my CSC homeland. Over the last few years I have been actively involved in the service creation and leading edge forum work – being a change agent – or as I also refer to it “professional pain in the ass”, with a view to what could be done differently.

The service creation work is innovation done proactively to ensure that the across the board service portfolio keeps up with the changing ways in which service delivery can happen and what improvements can be achieved in business operations with those solutions, often harvesting from leading edge cases and adjusting for global consumption.

In addition CSC like all IT services companies have built means to innovate to attract talent where it resides but also to ponder on how to shave the cost profile from the aspects of business still reliant of labor based models. As part of the outsourcing deals there is invariably the question of how will you lower cost over the contract time and what are you doing about off shoring.

CSC like Nokia has also had to think long and hard about the shape of the organization and the cultural aspects. While again there is a need to hold on to key differentiating cultural elements like for example the problem solving ethos there is also a need to keep changing in both horizontal operations and vertical operations – these changes are ongoing and I leave further commenting on the details to others.

The key point is that CSC innovates at the client interface and at the core in parallel models – to bring about a leveraged model of learning and competitiveness. And unlike with Nokia products [the tangible stuff] the CSC services change continuously.

We have a choice with the level of ambition we take with innovation

We can be creating waves, riding waves or crashing waves. The last one is not really a choice but rather an outcome of doing nothing.

Trends like ALL IP, bandwidth at the edge, bandwidth in mobile, connected things, location and presence, time and space and life go liquid, mobile becoming part of the enterprise and everyday life in deeper ways are all pushing the innovation agenda within the ICTI industry and for other industries.

These trends are changing fundamentally many tightly held beliefs about how a particular business functions and why. How? By taking away the hurdles that existed before for doing what is most natural to us humans. Technology is becoming more human. The emergent business behavior promises to be very different from before and cut the models of yesteryear from the will [day or minute in the world of the Internet cycle of launches].

The innovation dimensions are still the same. Both Nokia and CSC have to shift their models towards more transparency, dealing with the prosumer [client or client's client] on steroids. They are telling how it is whether you ask for an opinion or not, and wanting their share, participating in the creation of products, selling of products and wanting a fair cut in royalties and the like. It is the C – generation, ready to hang in there for the fun of it for a little while but wanting Cash too.

In both product and service side the emergent model is about volume but also about tailoring and rapid adjustments. The output is a merged one of product, service and solution. The people who work on your projects are not necessarily your employees. Maybe they are part of the broader ecosystem, maybe they are part of the open source movement, maybe they are part of another organization, which needs parts of your output for make their model work…..

The emerging world is about continuous launch and the organizations need to be stretchy – like rubber able to reach far and contract as needed but also in thought able to think very differently and having an inbuilt readiness to do that.

Companies need to have their vision and yet move fast. I call this foxtrot positioning. It is innovating to create some waves of your own and riding a few others.

In a way the ethos for the next phase of innovation approaches could be something like, “We shape things and we live it, NOW and in ten years time”

What do climat change and books have to do with each other?

Illusions and cycles and beliefs….cannot believe the amount of disagreement

Since my arrival in Sydney in 1988 this is the coldest and wettest winter….I don’t want to debate cycles and illusions and beliefs about that. Just a very practical observation. When so much water comes down that a city is not built for it – there are problems.

Over the last two days we had water flowing in through the roof – luckily we caught that one and it is getting a good fix for the back flow of torrential rains. Spreading the water from the drains etc. We also had water flow into our under house storage, which is not unusual when there is a lot of water. This time though we – despite plastic boxing for years – found 3 boxes of “to be saved” things soaking. Children’s nursery rhymes in Finnish and English destroyed.

I love my books. I have a hard time letting go of them. We did donate about eight large boxes over the last some weeks. Sniff. There is something tactile, sensual even, they are a sign of moments in life, they mean more than the story in the book. They are about life and thoughts as they unfold.

We’re lucky that one of our neighbors has stored a number of boxes of books I shipped from Finland when my father passed away. He – Antero Jaurola – was a collector of Nobel prize winner books. They are all in Finnish. Bar Sillanpaa’s books the books are all translations. In culling my books I chucked out many translations.

Thank you Duncan and Ethel for storing those books so long.

I do have some in electronic format too.

Currently I am reading a story about muses and the artists – by Francine Prose. I am reading this one on my mac. I also bought wisdom of the crowds as an electronic book but bought the real thing too The relationship between the artist and the muse is intriguing. A life long passion. No matter what the situation or age difference or what ever.

So what do climat change and books have to do with each other? Nothing much. Electronic books don’t need storage and this book on muses is on my laptop…and issues of storage on it are chronic.

So no matter what storage is an issue and climate change is making one of them tricky.

Right.

Home sweet home

Travelling for business is made easier by a return to a home

Living amongst the rainbow lorrikeets and kookaburras for the last 10 years has been wonderful. We have had a little paradise on earth only about 15-20min from Sydney center. Now we are looking at changing our lifestyles to more city living or maybe cities.

We only just finished the last stage of renovations and it feels funny to leave now, but now is a good time to sell and make a change so we’re going for it. Unless we don’t get the offers we want and then we’ll stay here…. We can only win in this either way

Friends and family, don’t worry we’ll have some space for you in the new place too…

The pendulum swing

We are a very excitable lot, us humans.

When we come up with something new we get all gung ho about its potential and impact. Once we’ve established that it is not going to happen quite so fast then we no longer notice the changes happening around us. Is that because we became rather blaze about the whole thing when the emergent first hit us – something like been there done that?

Then we underestimate finally the overall impact the new technology [as an example - mostly it is about that] has on our lives.

Sometimes all this partying goes just too far and when we realize we have been overindulging on the hoopla we figure we were silly and what ever and we pooh pooh the whole thing and thank some force for saving us from the extremes. [we post rationalize it - our smarts did it]….

As a consequence we then overreact – just for balance right – in the other direction… and guess what we’re post rationalizing again. We are so good at explaining all for the best. I guess it hurts less.

This pendulum swing is a good business idea too. I think I know some people who make it a habit to look at what everyone seems to be talking about or what opinion prevails and then take the opposite view and call themselves change gurus. Not bad, knowing what happens with the pendulum.

The pendulum is some kind of a sign of our fear of being left behind.

What on earth do we really learn from all this? We don’t seem to hold on to much learning from the swings, eventually it all comes together, but it is mostly not the initial drivers who make things happen.

What is the medicine then? Perhaps what we need to do is to remember that we can only take in so much at a time, we need time to assimilate and then we need to manage our expectations to suit. If we still overdo it we should remember that what we experienced before is just waiting for the next time the conditions of interest prevail.

So goes the pendulum. If we’re lucky we learn to not let that handle swing quite so far and back again. Curb it at both ends!

Mobile business design

An example of how technology obscures and then surprises us

What is mobile business design. It is in essence a layered view of an organisation from circa early 20th century to today.

A mobile business design leverages a history and a present and some near term future.

History

A salesman did not sit in an office writing memos [read e-mails] to his clients. He was travelling. He was face to face. He was living the life of the client. For some 20 funny years in many ways we forgot this and then refound it as a great argument when mobile phones came around. wow!

Present

After a little confusion we’ve now come back but with a vengeance. Now we can not only send the lonely salesman out on the road but we can actually keep him company, send him things to help out and listen to the evolving status of the client case. The salesman gets to go home at night and come to the office when it is time to celebrate a success.

Future

Deep immersion anyone. The roads never travelled! The virtual path to success. The party is still at the face to face locale of choice.

Just no energy today to be more deep and meaningful about the important topic of Mobile Business Design. Just to show a little thought journey on how we pendulum swing with our innovations but always in a slightly different place. And yet, we’re still just humans.

Technology – a disruption or a compromise

Technology layering – obscuring the goals

It is uncanny how we seem to be surprised by human behaviors and needs as it relates to technology.

Much of technology is a compromise. It is a step on a path to something. What?

As we explain to ourselves and our buyers of the need for this device and that object we obscure the real aim and the true desires which drive the behaviors.

We can fly – in a plane, we can talk to each at a distance – on a phone, we can get from place A to place B faster – in a car.

As we get stuck in the idea of the technology itself we forget that there are other ways to achieve the same goals.

These new pathways are the left field attack we did not expect to come and disrupt our day dreams for the improved technology.

Uncanny that!

Seeing shapes of what might be

Exploring

…an excerpt….

McLUHAN: “Sometimes I wonder. I’m making explorations. I don’t know where they’re going to take me. My work is designed for the pragmatic purpose of trying to understand our technological environment and its psychic and social consequences. But my books constitute the process rather than the completed product of discovery; my purpose is to employ facts as tentative probes, as means of insight, of pattern recognition, rather than to use them in the traditional and sterile sense of classified data, categories, containers. I want to map new terrain rather than chart old landmarks.

But I’ve never presented such explorations as revealed truth. As an investigator, I have no fixed point of view, no commitment to any theory — my own or anyone else’s. As a matter of fact, I’m completely ready to junk any statement I’ve ever made about any subject if events don’t bear me out, or if I discover it isn’t contributing to an understanding of the problem. The better part of my work on media is actually somewhat like a safe-cracker’s. I don’t know what’s inside; maybe it’s nothing. I just sit down and start to work. I grope, I listen, I test, I accept and discard; I try out different sequences — until the tumblers fall and the doors spring open.” 1969 Playboy interview

Many a futurist would recognise themselves in this quote. I believe there are some common traits in those who are attracted by the foresight field…..I need to ponder on those later or better yet, if you visit the Association of Professional Futurists site there are some indications there on what those are.

Continuity vs. sustainability

Reinventing to survive

2007 seems to be the year that those who spent years on sustainability [environmental] and seemed to get very little public attention have finally been given a small thank you for the efforts. The spotlight is on climate change.

To sustain a business over changes in people inside and outside the organization, cultures, visions, technologies, competitive moves is not currently included in the ’sustainability’ discussion but is part of the bigger picture. The business world talks about business continuity. What is not often obvious in the articles about business continuity is how companies go about that. The books “Good to Great” and “Built to Last” by Jim Collins et al provide examples and conclusions …. It is not clear though that those provide a utopian model to business. There is not yet a model, which provides an element of ‘guarantee’ for sustained existence over decades and perhaps centuries.

I could site Nokia as an example to learn something from. It was NOT a mobile phones company in 1865 when it was founded. But the story is perhaps well known. It is easy to downplay the fact that the executive and the board of the company completely changed the company’s industry many times over the last 140 years. It transitioned in stages always meaningful somehow to the old world and yet looking into a new horizon. The journey from a paper and pulp company to mobile phones is not obvious, even in hindsight let alone foresight.

From a business continuity point of view this means that real people made real decisions to go where no man had gone before, or just gently slid into expansions over time, which seemed rather natural extensions to the previous business, industry and model. Often both dramatic and smooth transitions are necessary for a company to survive over a long time. These move the company from the nurturing comfort of ‘others like us’ to ‘we’re going to have to figure this out for ourselves’.

It is odd then that the business schools have been teaching so many theories of business continuity, which really at some point kill the goose. Benchmarking [navel gazing], market research [quantified, history], competitive analysis [more navel gazing], etc

Packaging frustrations

Symptoms of what problem?

Just in the last few years I have encountered numerous problems with packaging and I do wonder why it is so hard to think it through and make it easy.

1/ Toothpaste is packaged mostly [one major well known brand in Oz anyway] in carton tubes, which hide the look of the tube inside. I cannot stand the tube with the small cap as it is always messy. And I cannot see what sort of tube is inside the packaging. So I chose other brands where I know what I am buying. So draw me a picture…. toothpaste packaging for the dummies…

2/ Headsets and many other things sold at airport electronic goods stores are packaged in heat sealed plastic containers, which are impossible to open without scissors, which one does not have. So remember to ask the seller to open it or you will not be using the purchase in a hurry.

3/ Food containers are getting there. And so are the tools available at home to open just about the nastiest of packages. I love the one that has various size possibilities to create a lever around glass jar lids.

4/ Not huge on make-up but I have got some nail polish. The nail polish has a beautiful cover on top of the real lid and when one tries to open the polish the beauty does the rounds on the real lid and nothing opens.

5/ Tiny toothpaste tubes in airline kits have very tight lids which are at times really tricky to open. A struggle with toothpaste in an airplane WC while the queue gets longer… not my idea of fun.

6/ Wine corks. Some of them are so tight that the travel kit opener has a tough time opening them. Hotel room. Away from home. Wouldn’t mind a glass of wine while reading…. go to corner store, have a friendly chat with store keeper as feeling elated already by the quiet moment with the book and the glass of wine. Arrive in room, prepare bath, or what ever, go to open bottle….call reception for help and then really need that bath. Alternatively, buy Australian wine with screw tops [many Oz marks seem to have those].

In general I wonder about the amount of plastic still used to surround the products.

Are we suffering again for the minority, which steals, does other nasty things or are these just an excuse to not innovate?