6/9 Trends for the decade ahead: Meet your Chief Wellness Data Officer

It can be no surprise that the #contextshock of a pandemic has led to the emergence and acceleration of a trend to Wellness. Number 6/9 in this series is where we meet the Chief Wellness Data Officer - charged with Wellness management for business performance in increasingly decentralised organisations.

This series of articles considers the changes in context that digital technologies have set running in the eco-systems of our lived experiences. The consequences are new contexts for our needs. It is in the serving of these new needs that future prosperity awaits.

The trends driving new contexts are:

1. Sustainability
2. Decentralisation
3. Personalisation
4. Low Code/No Code
5. Automation
6. Wellness
7. Small Pieces
8. Platform
9. Start-up

The most successful will be those which respond where multiple trends converge. For example a Sustainable, Decentralised, Personalised product focusing on Wellness and applying Automation to deliver an ever-improving experience.

A proxy for predicting the success of your future plans could therefore be in the number of trends ticked off.

But trends do not a value product make. Instead, trends direct you to where to look for the consequent future experiences from which need emerges.

So you will need to understand the impact of these trends on the human experience. Faster Future Consulting's #ResponsiveOrganisation framework can help here. Other frameworks are, of course, available. 

This series has already detailed 1. Sustainability 2. Decentralisation 3. Personalisation 4. Low-Code/No-Code and 5. Automation (links are in the list above) My intent is to put meat on the bones of each trend and explore potential consequent contexts for each. As these emerge we also explore a new narrative: We Are All Companies Now.

We continue with Wellness.

6. Wellness.

The evidence stacks up. When we measure and track our health, we maintain it more effectively.

This extends to mental as well as physical wellbeing. Both have risen up the agenda in the last year because of the rate of change we have been exposed to. And while we may strive to maintain a growth mindset, the preference for efficiency at the heart of our energy-hungry brains drives us to seek certainty.

We may be truth-seeking machines powered by doubt, but doubt is far from our preferred state.

This desire for predictability takes it toll:

1. Those working from home are tackling the Zoombie Apololypse, in which we create mirages of normality to avoid the reality of uncertainty around us - hampering our ability to respond to it.

Our capability to respond towards the needs of the future are already constrained - and that's before we even consider that:

1. We are building up a crisis of mental and physical health as we over-commit to the home office. Some of the evidence behind that can be found here.

This latter - powered by the business imperative toward both responsibility (as emerging in our trend to Sustainability) and Responsiveness (being able to build better in response to change) will provide the context for a range of new solutions which treat employees in as targeted and thoughtful way as we have sought to get the best from our relationships with customers.

The same focus on personalisation vs employee wellbeing can enhance both employee happiness and effectiveness. Imagine taking the data we are able to capture about our distributed teams' use of technology - could we identify when an individual works at their best, can we identify emerging unhappiness from rate of key stroke, use of language, changes in normal routines etc?

Could we respond by deploying smart and caring interventions? Positive psychology (eg go for a walk - we're locking you out of your screen for 1 hour, you need the break).

We are seeing many organisations provide lists of pledges and commitments designed to encourage employee wellbeing. Next we will see the technology applied to ensure it.

Employees are already wearing devices to ensure they don't spend too much time using heavy machinery (for example) to avoid physical health impacts. Do we trust our employers to access our wearable tech for our mutual benefit across the board?

This principle, that trust is the belief that the other party has your best interests at heart, is core. In the last year we have seen Gartner's Future of Work Trends - with data gathered in April this year - identifying that 16% of employers admitted to the gathering of passive employee data. For example: virtual logging/clocking in and out; computer and phone use; use of email, internal communication and chats; and location or movement.

There are levers that can be deployed, of course; insurance and workplace benefits, for example. Both can be played as carrot or stick.

But the biggest barrier - as it is in access to your data in all scenarios - will be trust. One thing companies have learned in the last year is that they CAN trust their employees to do a great job when out of sight. They have the data... The key to success in this emerging era of distributed wellness management is for employers to earn the same level of trust from their employees.

More specifically, we will have to learn - through experience - to trust that the algorithms' interpretation of our personal data does serve our benefit.

This is why in the next decade the role of Chief Wellness Data Officer is set to be among the most important roles for business performance. Get the gathering and application of such data wrong and you will create a huge drag on performance. Get it right and the organisation will fly.

See also Business Wellness - lived and delivered by @Centigo.

Next: We conclude with a trifecta - 7. Small Pieces, 8. Platform & 9. Start-up

A new narrative

The new narrative that 'We Are All Companies Now' offers a way to understand the impact of all nine trends on how we live and work. Just as the narrative 'We Are All Publishers Now' did when I coined it in relation to the impact of the web on the world of media and publishing back in 2008.

At first, even with the arrival of the web, the majority consumed what the minority produced as publishers. Today in 2020 almost everyone being entertained or informed by the web is also publishing (or at least distributing) what is consumed.

So I expect the vast majority of us will want to continue to consume what the smaller number of us create as companies (just as we did as potential publishers) for quite some time to come.

But I do expect more and more people to engage in the value creating activity we see enshrined in the formation of companies and while the first experience of this is likely to be in the context of an internal platform, it seems to me that the trends listed here (as will become clearer as the detail for each trend in the series continues), point towards a future in which how we create value and the organisations within which we do that, are reconfigured, just as the media industry has been disrupted.

As my friend Rory Yates points out, responsibility is a key part of this narrative. If capability is decentralised and empowered within the node, little will change unless the nodes (and that's you and I, folks) take responsibility for the wise and positive use of those capabilities.

Increasingly we will consider how to codify responsibility vs organisations' purpose and strategy. Smart contracts will be deployed to ensure our machines work to the same standards that we hold each other accountable for.

In a company context, that involves a large degree of trust in employees. In the context of society, it involves a large helping of trust in each other. The very human urge to co-operate is not reduced by how much we can contribute. We return to this in trend 8 - Platform, later in this series.

• Follow Faster Future Consulting for access to the detail behind all 9 trends today.

Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash