9 Trends shaping the next decade - No.2: Decentralisation

Continuing my series on the 9 Trends that will shape the next decade - and the new narrative emerging with them, Trend 2 in the series is Decentralisation.

Each of these trends change the context in which we experience our lives. The consequences of these new contexts will be new needs. In serving those new needs, future prosperity awaits. More background can be found in the first article of the series, published here.

In my view 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
10. 
    

The most successful responses will be found where multiple trends converge. But trends do not a value product make. Instead, trends direct us 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 supports this. 

As we move through this series we detail each trend and explore potential consequent contexts. Together they reside in a new narrative: that We Are All Companies Now.

We continue here with.

2. Decentralisation. 

This trend has been accelerating since the web started usurping production lines as the primary means of value production.

It has only been accelerated by Covid-19. The future of decentralisation was already here, it has simply been distributed more evenly in the last year to include where we work. We have explored this in some depth applying the hashtag #distributedteams. Examples include:

How Digital Tools Are Bossing Our Culture;

When Every Workplace Interaction Is A Meeting;

Offices Are For Creativity - Home Is For Productivity.

The same trend is further disrupting computing; with 5G, the demands of AI and the easy availability of Internet Of Things devices, driving a demand for Edge Computing.

The nodes on the network are becoming increasingly self-sufficient, being enabled with both the capabilities and capacities to do what only centralised functions could achieve before.

The media industry was first to feel this punch (We Are All Publishers Now). Is there a corollary of this in the future of work (We Are All Companies Now)?

This particular new context, converged with automation and start-up (detailed later in this series) open a world of new needs for solutions that democratise building a business - across all functions from raising finance to developing the technology.

• Tomorrow: Personalisation.

A new narrative

The 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.

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.

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

Photo by Ivan Dostál on Unsplash