Making the impossible possible

Limitless and free

Can you work out what these people’s job was, 60 years ago?

It’s 1963, in the Netherlands. Drivers phoned a hotline and real humans would give directions. It cost both money and time to do this, including to transcribe instructions you were given. Today, of course, we have Google Maps installed on more than half of all mobile phones globally (Fun fact: there are more mobile phones than people, almost 9 billion).

And, this is just a small part of the much larger trend towards both universality and low (or no) cost.

In Australia right now, the average household has 22 internet-connected devices. (Count yours - how many do you have?). These consume close to 500Gb of data each month. By 2030, both those numbers will at least double. This is paralleled by the 99% decline in price of a gigabyte of internet data between when I, wide-eyed, first opened my Mosaic browser in 1994, and now.

And, even this is far from the most extreme case of: “Something everyone does for free that previously only rich people had”. Consider lighting. 200 years ago, an hour of light (from a candle) cost 660 times as much as an hour of (LED) light today. We could list dozens of examples — water, transportation, calories, heat, among them — and realise that our lives are shaped by these seemingly limitless services, that are close to free or very low cost.

Question: What will tomorrow’s limitless commodity be, and what will the effect be on your business??

A complete solution

In November I delivered a keynote at the UN on “Scaling up large systems for impact”.

We were talking about the environmental systems, but I reminded participants about the numerous systems within systems that make our world possible. Many were impossibilities 100 years ago, even less.

One hundred years ago, it would have taken at least a month to drive coast to coast in the US. Roads outside cities were dirt (and mud when it rained), and cars were slow and prone to punctures and breakdown. Today, you can do it in 40 hours of actual driving time, all on freeways, in a car that will easily cover the 4500 kilometres without incident. And, you’ll be safer too - road deaths back then were 20 per 100 million miles; today it’s just 1.5.

What are the systems that combine to make this possible? There are dozens. Car design: tyres, engines, brakes, stabilisation. Road design: surfacing, lighting and lane markings. Public education: driver training and signage. Regulation: licensing, prohibitions on drink and drug driving, speed limits. These all combine to create something (‘rapid transportation’) that would have been unthinkable.

We could say the same for any large scale system that benefits society.

Think about the systems that reduce pain. Today the majority of the US’s 40 million annual operations are conducted with anaesthesia, and 10% of the entire population uses pain medication in any given week. What systems make this possible? Medical research and drug discovery, pharmaceutical manufacturing and distribution, doctor training, medical service delivery. Not to mention the institutions that ‘contain’ (train, regulate, deliver) all of these: colleges of pain physicians and anaesthetists, hospitals, pharmacies.

My work frequently involves bringing together leaders from across the boundaries of the systems, to explore how to make these systems even better. Or, sometimes, how to solve entirely unsolved problems. Our starting point is always to ask, “What does a complete solution look like, for everyone?”

Question: What systems do you need to link YOUR system with, to get a ‘complete solution’ for your beneficiaries??

Knowledge breeds confidence

My mother, Gabriella, arrived in Australia as a 23-year old refugee migrant on a stinking hot day in January 1957.

As her ship steamed into Port Philip Bay, the temperature inside the non-AC cabin she shared with five other women was above 40 degrees and my mother made a fateful decision. She bundled up her European winter coat - and threw it out the porthole into the bay.

She explained, later, that she thought Australia was always hot, and she’d never need warm clothes ever again. I think my mother’s knowledge of Australia was limited to half a dozen ‘facts’ before she actually arrived.

Fast forward almost 70 years to today.

Her namesake, and granddaughter, is also 23 and in Year 2 of an au-pair adventure in Europe. The younger Gabriella has a miraculous device in her pocket that tells her the weather everywhere she travels. Moreover, it gets cheap airfares, puts her in touch with her friends’ friends, and finds decent and cheap accommodation (except for the time in Helsinki when she and her girlfriend inadvertently booked dorm beds in a homeless shelter).

The younger Gabriella’s information density is thousands of times that of the older’s — and consequently, so is the confidence with which she travels. When I was 23, I desperately wanted to visit India — but with the limited (pre-internet) information I had available, I was simply too nervous to branch out on my own. I suspect young Gabriella wouldn’t have the same reaction today — and would simply buy her tickets and get organised.

Nearly all the organisations I do strategic work with highlight data accessibility and democratising information as crucial to evidence-based decision-making and, hence, their success. Which leads me to ask . . .

Question: How can you increase information density and availability so you can make more confident decisions in your organisation?

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And, if you’re interested in how to create societal change that turns the impossible to the possible, click below to get a complimentary copy of my book, titled . . . wait for it: “From Impossible to Possible”.

Enjoy reading, and see you next Friday,

Andrew