How to transform your business with technology.

Since the dawn of time we've used technology to make what we do easier, it's worked brilliantly, but what if technology was now advancing so fast and was so transformative, we should start working around it?

I wrote this for TM Forum, please see the full version and comments on their site, using this link.

For 300 years we’ve made the same mistake; we’ve used technology like oil to lubricate what we’ve got, not like oxygen to make new things possible. More than any other time, in order to transform business for the future, we need to unleash the power of technology and work with it at the core, to build around it and to re-imagine what is possible.

It took several decades for the profound power of electricity to transform the world. For many years we applied electricity at the edges – we used it to power the same drive belts in factories and with marginal gains, we used it for safer Christmas tree lighting to reduce fires. For years, we thought we’d understood it – we were proud and content. It’s only in retrospect we realize how wrong we were. The real power of electricity was that factories could be moved near ports and away from power sources, equipment could be moved into new layouts, and that the very fabric of our homes could be altered by it. The secret to transformation with electricity was to build around it, not to use it as garnish to what we had.

Shifting the paradigm

Our offices, retailers, airports, stations, doctors’ offices – every single business in the world – is constructed on lazy linear assumptions from the early computerized age. Businesses have replaced typewriters with desktop computers, and in the most forward-thinking offices, with laptops .Emails have replaced internal mail, bulky phones still punctuate our desks. The ways we work, the atomic units of meetings, appointments, status meetings, emails have become mere electrified interpretations of the past.

Retailers’ tills become laser scanners and funky desks. We’ve always felt skeuomorphism was a disease of digital visual design, yet it’s beyond this – we’ve designed our offices, processes and structure around limitations that no longer exist.

Our muscle memory of the past is humanity’s biggest barrier – change comes from the edges, from mutations, from freaks who question everything. Linear progression produces nothing, transformation comes from paradigm shifts.

In order to compete in the modern age, incremental change will at best keep you the same distance behind your competitors, but increasingly put you at risk from new disruptive entrants.

Uber came about from a group of people who were advantaged by not understanding anything about how taxis work, only that bold thinking could challenge that market. AirBnB comes from destroying all known and accepted wisdom, Snapchat comes from the sort of wild dreaming that normally gets removed by growing up.

Re-imagining what’s possible

The two most powerful processes in business are putting new technology at the core of ideation and forgetting everything we’ve ever learned. It’s the re-imagination of what’s possible with the oxygen of technology at the core.

If we’d never known any form of world before now we wouldn’t build our environment to be like this.

Hotels would not have large immovable desks with huge computers taking up vital space – they’d likely be lounge-like areas where guests could sit and where helpers would approach them with tablets to check them in. Doctors would keep patient records on tablets, use real-time software to manage workload, reduce delays, prioritize patients and become vastly more efficient. From the police and airport check-in staff, to dentists and rental car workers, the tools of our trades would fast become the mobile phone and the tablet.

While we may obsess about millennials, we need to focus on new behaviors coming from people who’ve never known business in a pre-mobile world. The disdainful glance of a toddler swiping a magazine, the ‘this is not a touchscreen’ labels on airport monitors – this is the world we need to design for.  This is a world where our mobiles are our primary access point to the world, where removing friction is the ultimate goal, where our notification layer becomes the most valuable real estate in the world, where impulsive decisions and wandering attentions go hand in hand.

Why isn’t Hertz offering me upgrades as I enter their premises? Why isn’t American airlines offering me a same-day flight change with a swipe and $50? Why are hotel chains not beaming me last-minute rates as I reach the end of my day driving far from home?

It’s about internal work processes too. Do we all need access to Excel in a world where data can exist in the cloud and be accessed by technology? Do we need to make endless PowerPoint decks when we could just tell a story via online dashboards and compelling words? Couldn’t we work better freed from our desks, aided by smartphones and screens around us that we project onto? Enterprise software was once about making existing work patterns and processes more efficient, the next level of improvement is when we work around it and allow it to transform the nature of work.

The ‘digital department’

We believe our chance to exploit the opportunities of the new world is something for the digital department, or tech team. This is nonsense. We over-value the role of experts in making stuff happen and undervalue the input of those who understand the customer, new behaviors and what is possible. Toy Story was lovingly written and conceived without the aid of programmers. The next-step changes come from the same combination of a village and people who don’t know things can’t be done. In a world where tech changes so fast, assuming everything is possible produces greater results, not being limited by what’s been done before.

And don’t rely on ROI – you can’t meaningfully predict the results of something that’s never been done before, but the risk is in not taking a leap of faith.

In the world of last mover advantage, the way to beat the competition is to disrupt yourself before others do.