If I could only see the future...

The foreign exchange market is huge. It trades more in a day than the entire stock market trades in a year. There is money to be made in foreign exchange trading and so it attracts lots of smart people and has plenty of resources. Smart people and resources means that they should have a better shot at knowing where the world is going and not being surprised by stuff.  Were you as amazed as I was last week when the dollar crashed and then rose like a phoenix to be higher than it had been before the US elections?

It seems that even smart people with resources can't see the future.

Moving from Forecast to Foresight

Being human means suffering from, 'The Shock of the Unexpected'*. Have you ever been surprised by events, to the point where you can feel that your brain has shut down and your emotions are raging?  What happens is that a bit of your old 'crocodile brain' towards the base of your neck turns off the modern frontal bits. Have you heard the gibberish you speak when you are in that state?**  (Just think of some of the things you have said in response to the surprise POTUS event I'll bet you are fully convinced even if there is no evidence).  Of course it's gibberish, your logical brain is turned off! 

I don't have resources, and I know about the danger of the shock of the unexpected and I do know how it can devastate your performance and get you making dumb decisions.  So I created two Performance Enhancement Tools (PETs) to solve this for me.  I know that once you have imagined an event, however unlikely, when it happens your brain doesn't get hijacked.  in fact you will feel a bit smug and happy that what you predicted has come true!  I know that today is the most probable day to precede tomorrow.  And that means tomorrow will be the most likely day to follow today.  So in idle moments I FutureDream and FutureMap.  Dreaming solves the emotional shock. Mapping gives me an idea of what might happen next.

Today I would like you to spend half your commuting time or coffee time FutureDreamingTM.  Choose something important for you, say a meeting with your favourite client.  Now imagine surprise events which could affect it. Start with the good ones, such as your client has been promoted, move to negative ones which could knock you off course, then move to slightly crazy ones and then back to positive ones at each stage note your feeling about the event. 

Tomorrow I would like you to create a FutureMapTM following the QwikGuide instructions here

In a complex changing world Strategy is the process of consciously manipulating the future

Join QUBE because the future is just about to happen

* the scientific description is Amygdala hijack

** psychologists call this cognitive dissonance

NEW TALKS FROM EDDIE OBENG FOR 2017:

UNCERTAINTY - The leadership and strategic mind-set and toolkit to help you navigate the current global uncertainty.

NEURO-COLLABORATION - Making the most of digital opportunities to allow human minds to collaborate and engage.

METAMORPHOSIS - Transforming your incumbent/legacy organisation to outperform digital disruptors.

AGILITY - Successful and fast delivery of 'foggy' change in a turbulent business environment.

PERSUASION - Innovative Leadership in Complex Times - A master class in how to get just about anyone to follow you doing something new.

HUMAN-MACHINE - Visions and strategies for the future of work in a world where machines are stronger and smarter than us.

They laughed when I said I liked uncertainty, they're not laughing now.

It's the millennium. A typical group of typical senior managers are agreeing on who to promote. The choice is between a manager who presents clear plans, good business cases and can demonstrate that they have experience and another who doesn't' do any of those things.  Who would they promote? But, remember even then, offshoring and outsourcing, of the more easily specified parts of the organisation, meant remaining internal roles had more complexity and change to deal with.

How to respond to different Types of Change

Now we live in what the BBC has called the "Age of Uncertainty" and I call the "World After Midnight". Now almost all the work and change in the organisation contains huge uncertainties. We are uncertain of what to do. We are uncertain of how to deliver or, sometimes, we are uncertain of both what and how. What use is a manager who is best at dealing in areas of clarity?

I wrote a book which became an FT best seller, about the best ways to deal with All Change! It's here in .pdf format so you can read it but not too easily ( :-) that way you'll probably end up buying a copy)

Today I would like you to try to classify what type of change your biggest change challenges are. Plot them on a map of change types. You will find an explanation here

Surfing a world of change means knowing more 'bout waves.

You must get on QUBE because you become more certain in your uncertainty

NEW TALKS FROM EDDIE OBENG FOR 2017:

UNCERTAINTY - The leadership and strategic mind-set and toolkit to help you navigate the current global uncertainty.

NEURO-COLLABORATION - Making the most of digital opportunities to allow human minds to collaborate and engage.

METAMORPHOSIS - Transforming your incumbent/legacy organisation to outperform digital disruptors.

AGILITY - Successful and fast delivery of 'foggy' change in a turbulent business environment.

PERSUASION - Innovative Leadership in Complex Times - A master class in how to get just about anyone to follow you doing something new.

HUMAN-MACHINE - Visions and strategies for the future of work in a world where machines are stronger and smarter than us.

How < not > to do Digital Transformation

Digital Transformation is our current NEXT BIG THING.  Only it's not.

In most instances it is simply adding cost complexity and confusion to our already complex lives.  Here's an example.  This is a message I received.

It's obviously supposed to improve my customer experience and has been generated automatically probably via some sort of 'Internet Of Things' capability, where my parcel has informed the system of where it is!  

This would be amazing but for two things.  

Imagine phoning a friend to say, "Hello.  You may have won the lottery today."  and then hanging up!  That would be pretty pointless. So, one word in the message, "attempt."   The word also tells me that their system is not joined-up or predictable and repeatable.  

Secondly, the message is sent from a 'no reply account' which means I can't tell them that I will not be in or suggest a better time for me.  They will therefore waste time and money trying to deliver the parcel anyway, even though I could have saved them the expense of a wasted journey.  I therefore know that the person who wrote the message, the one who signed it off and the one who set it up in a jumble of multiple fonts have not shifted their mindsets to our World After Midnight customer-centricity and interdependence.  I also know that they have not altered their behaviour in any way, probably just doing digitally what they may once have done with a card through the door or phone call.

This type of attempt to 'do Digital Transformation', I have fondly categorised as 'Accesorising' in my model MetaMorph(TM) in my upcoming book.  It misunderstands that Digital Transformation is Human Transformation enabled by digital opportunities and gets swept up by the technologies themselves or device fetishes

Unpublished studies show that many companies have seen a 8-10% increase in the costs of information and communications technology (ICT) and a significant increase in complexity, but without any positive impact on productivity. Published work by Forrester Research indicates that on average less than ~6% of organisations are gaining differentiation from their attempts at digital transformation.

Take a look at your organisation.  If you see lots of new scarves, ties bangles and excitingly coloured socks beware you are not Digitally Transforming

NEW TALKS FROM EDDIE OBENG FOR 2017:

UNCERTAINTY - The leadership and strategic mind-set and toolkit to help you navigate the current global uncertainty.

NEURO-COLLABORATION - Making the most of digital opportunities to allow human minds to collaborate and engage.

METAMORPHOSIS - Transforming your incumbent/legacy organisation to outperform digital disruptors.

AGILITY - Successful and fast delivery of 'foggy' change in a turbulent business environment.

PERSUASION - Innovative Leadership in Complex Times - A master class in how to get just about anyone to follow you doing something new.

HUMAN-MACHINE - Visions and strategies for the future of work in a world where machines are stronger and smarter than us.

Myths to Methods: Mobile to Money

I'm getting a bit fed up with urban-myths sold as fact.  "Remote working is impossible."  "People travel to offices because digital technologies can't replace face-to-face."  "You can't work virtually until you've met face-to-face."  The list goes on and on in ignorance.

Recently had a conversation where I was told in no uncertain terms that, 'You can't work virtually unless you had met face to face!'  I asked the speaker politely if he had ever tried working digitally or virtually first, or at all to which the reply came back, gruffly, "No! Because it wouldn't work!"

Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.- Lord Kelvin (1824-1907), ca. 1895, British mathematician and physicist

Recently a Harvard Business review article by Carlo Ratti and Matthew Claudel caught my eye.  In it, they comment, “What early digital commentators missed is that even if we can work from anywhere, that does not mean we want to.” This is an incorrect observation. The truth is that most of us can’t WORK from anywhere. Work is often about human to human interactions, emotions, creativity and trust building or other relationships. Stop and think about it. I write a comment to this post. You read my comment and respond. Someone else responds to your comment and I read that… We NEVER interact as humans. You and I NEVER interact as human beings as we would in a real-life space. The bulk of the market for digital communication is not about human to human interaction. The digital communications which the authors go on to describe are about human beings interacting with data!  Here's a blog which expands and explains more.

I confess that in 1901 I said to my brother Orville that man would not fly for fifty years. Two years later we ourselves made flights. This demonstration of my impotence as a prophet gave me such a shock that ever since I have distrusted myself and avoided all predictions.- Wilbur Wright (1867-1912) [In a speech to the Aero Club of France (Nov 5, 1908)]  

My focus for the last decade has been on Enhanced Reality (ER)...ER is digital technologies put into action to re-create the human interactions with all the attendant emotions and physical spatial memories. ER then seeks to layer, on top of the human experience, features only digital technologies can enable such as: persistence, single points of view amongst several people search at a click, etc.  To my surprise we have created what I describe (and I  am biased) as a world beater...QUBE.  We are working towards making QUBE the world's most sought and bought productivity and education methods and behaviours.

In my Google Zeitgiest talk I explain how the daily commute has turned us into time travellers. (12 minutes if you have the time.) The authors are correct in their conclusions but for the wrong reasons. Over the past four years I have transitioned my organisation from offices to working globally via ER. Relationships are better, office politics has declined and most importantly productivity has risen by about a factor of five. I believe that we will continue to travel to offices until we transition from devices and digital applications which separate us from each other by making us interact with data to routinely making the technology serve us and enhance our human to human interactions.

And that's why slogans, for that is all it is like, "The world is going mobile." are so misleading.  Mobile means doing what we did in the 20th century and adding on digital opportunities simply as accessories!

Airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value.- Marshal Ferdinand Foch, French military strategist, 1911. He was later a World War I commander.

So if you've never experienced the 'Heavier than air flying machines of the digital communication world' - Enhanced reality (ER), I'd like to invite you to visit and explore my organisation which collaborates incredibly effectively, although we are permanently geographically dispersed. My stipulation is that you write up what you discover honestly and post them to this conversation.

Connect to me via Linkedin or as @EddieObeng

NEW TALKS FROM EDDIE OBENG FOR 2017:

UNCERTAINTY - The leadership and strategic mind-set and toolkit to help you navigate the current global uncertainty.

NEURO-COLLABORATION - Making the most of digital opportunities to allow human minds to collaborate and engage.

METAMORPHOSIS - Transforming your incumbent/legacy organisation to outperform digital disruptors.

AGILITY - Successful and fast delivery of 'foggy' change in a turbulent business environment.

PERSUASION - Innovative Leadership in Complex Times - A master class in how to get just about anyone to follow you doing something new.

HUMAN-MACHINE - Visions and strategies for the future of work in a world where machines are stronger and smarter than us.

Violence or Enlightenment? How will you harness technology to your service?

"I think watching violent acts (in VR- virtual reality) is a violent act in and of itself." bemoans Will Self on BBC Point of View.  @WSelf draws no comfort from an alleged drop in violence in the real world, as he sees us increasingly expressing our innate tendency towards violence in the virtual and online worlds.

Even a simple smartphone screen, a virtual experience, at the low end of immersion, has the power to make people forget where they are, what they are doing and who they are with.   This has led to a death rate of at least one in a million per year in the US and rising. That is not my vision.  

My vision is to use VR, or rather it's "beefed-up" cousin, ER (Enhanced Reality - not to be confused with Augmented Reality - AR) to allow us to solve many of the challenges we face in organisations and businesses and to enable us to do many things which, without ER, are completely impossible, such as having an interactive brainstorm with colleagues from around the world without taking a step towards each other!

ER (Enhanced Reality) methods & behaviours give us ‘super-powers’

I want to use the same emotionally engaging, intellectually collaborative and physically immersive environment to:

- boost business productivity by the power of five*

- embed executive education by the power of five*

- give us more time to give a damn about our interconnected living environment - sort of the opposite of violence

#LetsBeHumanAgain  

I think working collaboratively in an educated way (in ER - Enhanced Reality) is an enlightened act in and of itself.

Find out more about how we are doing this 


Meet and connect emotionally with people again instead of interacting with data 

Find out what users say: 

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So how does ER (Enhanced Reality) work exactly?

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• Real life/ normal way of doing things and the challenges it brings

ER (Enhanced Reality) methods & behaviours and how they give us ‘super powers’

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NEW TALKS FROM EDDIE OBENG FOR 2017:

UNCERTAINTY - The leadership and strategic mind-set and toolkit to help you navigate the current global uncertainty.

NEURO-COLLABORATION - Making the most of digital opportunities to allow human minds to collaborate and engage.

METAMORPHOSIS - Transforming your incumbent/legacy organisation to outperform digital disruptors.

AGILITY - Successful and fast delivery of 'foggy' change in a turbulent business environment.

PERSUASION - Innovative Leadership in Complex Times - A master class in how to get just about anyone to follow you doing something new.

HUMAN-MACHINE - Visions and strategies for the future of work in a world where machines are stronger and smarter than us.

Meet and chat with people #LetsBeHumanAgain  http://QUBE.cc @EddieObeng @QUBEcc

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