Future Ready Digest Vol.1 No.2
Jim Hamill (Dr)
Director at The Future Ready Hub - supporting organisations in becoming future ready for an increasingly volatile, digital and AI world.
Welcome to Vol.1 No. 2 of Future Ready Digest - keeping you up-to-date with the latest research and thinking on building future ready organisations. Please register to receive notifications of future digests.
Summary - let business decisions drive your data strategy; undertake an OPC Dexterity Audit - an honest self-evaluation of your organisation’s structure, people and cultural readiness for the new future of work; the metaverse - too big to ignore but its future remains uncertain; hierarchy is not dead but needs to be rethought for the 21st century; Web3 - a new dawn for the future of education?; ensuring MBA grads are future ready; the main barriers to becoming a data-driven organisation are non-technology related - people, culture, mindset, leadership; a useful primer covering different leadership theories; two books on AI to support your reading.
Good advice here from MIT on getting data analytics right, including "let business decisions drive your data strategy". One of the biggest mistakes companies make about analytics is the disconnect between the technology and real business decisions. Companies tend to collect data for the sake of having data, and to develop analytics for the sake of having analytics, without thinking about how they are going to use the data and analytics capabilities to inform business decisions. Successful analytics organizations are always decision-driven. They start by asking what business decisions they need data and analytics for, then investing resources to collect the right data and build the right analytics.
As posted previously, the first Toolkit in our series encouraged you to undertake an honest self-evaluation of the future readiness of your organisation’s core strategy and underlying business model for a rapidly changing world. Future ready strategies and business models require future ready organisational structures, future ready people and future ready cultures. In a world of pervasive change, traditional top-down power structures, rule-choked people and cultures have become a liability. The purpose of Toolkit 2 is to support you in undertaking an OPC Dexterity Audit; an honest self-evaluation of your organisation’s structure, people and cultural readiness for the new future of work. Your response to the ten questions, presented as an overall Scope for Improvement Score (OPC), provides a solid foundation for excising the legacy structures, management thinking and cultures that stifle innovation, agility and flexibility; replacing it with something better – an agile, modern, intelligent, human-focused, purpose driven, future ready organisation.
?"It’s too big to ignore - yet its future is far from certain. Companies need to dip a toe in the water and plan to take the plunge should developments warrant." Good advice in this new CEO guide to the metaverse via McKinsey. With a potential market value of $4 trillion to $5 trillion in 8 years, CEOs should view the metaverse as an enormous opportunity, and not be deterred by its risks. Use case examples already exist in brand marketing/consumer engagement (e.g. Nike's virtual presence); digital twins (allowing richer analyses); workplace engagement, staff training and development. However, there is still a long way to go before it reaches full commercial potential due to technology limitations and lack of connection between partial metaverses, so a cautious approach is advised. CEOs should start with "why", get practical with "what" use cases that fit their strategy, then champion the cause - setting vision & dispelling organizational skepticism.
In defence of hierarchy. A number of articles are beginning to appear criticizing the concept of "bossless" organisations This MIT Sloan Management Review paper argues that hierarchies remain resilient in business, but must be rethought for the 21st century to balance employee desires for autonomy with managerial authority on a large scale. The authors distinguish between two types of authority: Mark I (micromanagement) and Mark II (macromanagement). The challenge is to decide when each type of authority is most appropriate, as using one when the situation demands the other can have disastrous results. Companies should shift towards Mark II authority by delegating decisions while still ensuring coordination among employees in order to foster creativity without sacrificing accountability or speed of decision-making processes.
Is Web3 a new dawn for the future of education? Will the combination of artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain, and decentralized autonomous organizations be the new frontier significantly improving the online and hybrid experiences employed during the pandemic to reach students in remote areas with immersive, practical experiences? The death of distance, where learning can occur anywhere with internet access?"
?This one received a fair bit of attention when posted on LinkedIn. So ChatGPT passed an MBA exam at Wharton? Interesting experiment, but I think it misses the point entirely. If MBAs are focused on building "the skills of highly compensated knowledge workers......in the jobs held by MBA graduates including analysts, managers, and consultants", why are we using exams in the first place? In an era where many of the tasks associated with these positions will be automated, should we not be focusing more on ensuring that MBA grads are future ready?
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?From MIT. In my experience, the same is true of building future ready organisations generally. The main barriers are non-technology related - people, culture, mindset, leadership. "Every year in recent surveys, the great majority (80% this year) of respondents report that the principal challenges to becoming a data-driven organization are human - culture, people, process, or organization - rather than technological. Not surprisingly, respondents report making little progress toward that goal. Just 24% of respondents characterize their companies as data-driven, and only 21% say that they have developed a data culture within their organizations. Yet the focus of data executives in the survey is overwhelmingly on nonhuman issues - data modernization, data products, AI and machine learning, data quality, and various data architectures. Less than 2% of respondents ranked “data literacy” as an investment priority."
?A useful primer covering different leadership theories and how they are applied. I would probably add a few others including “humanocracy” and "leaders who create leaders". The Great Man Theory; Trait Theory; Behavioral Theory; Transactional Theory; Transformational Theory; Servant Leadership; and Contingency Theory.
?Yes exactly! And time for the education sector to move from its negative knee-jerk reaction to becoming future ready. “It can create new things, it's extraordinary at its earliest. It is not perfect, it is dangerous, and is going to really disrupt things.?But I frankly think it's going to open up possibilities for us to help people learn in ways that folks have never imagined."
?BOOKS
With the recent tsunami of papers on AI (many produced by AI), it is becoming more difficult to differentiate wheat from chaff. Tom Davenport's new book falls in the good read category. The book examines how extensive AI adoption offers a distinct competitive advantage to companies across a wide variety of industries and use cases. Well worth a read. All-In on AI: How Smart Companies Win Big With Artificial Intelligence.
Being human in the age of artificial intelligence. A new book on Life 3.0. The impact of AI on crime, war, justice, jobs, society and our very sense of being human.
AI is the future - but what will that future look like? Will superhuman intelligence be our slave, or become our god?
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Take care.
Jim H