Replacement

Fewer and fewer

It’s my birthday this weekend and, back when I was born in 1965, Australian women had, on average, three children. It’s barely half that now (1.66).

Similar birthrate declines are found in other developing nations and James Pomeroy, an HSBC economist, has published a projection that says the world’s population might peak as early as the 2040s (not in the 2080s which is the UN’s calculation ).

After that, Pomeroy says, the growing number of nations with ‘non-replacement’ birthrates will mean that by 2100 we might have just HALF of today’s population, or about 4 billion.

Why?

Three reasons: (i) women’s entry to labour markets means later child-bearing age; (ii) higher property prices mean smaller houses; and, chiefly, (iii) better education and access to healthcare and contraceptives. As more of the world’s population enters these ‘developed nation’ characteristics, fertility will drop.

Question: How could fewer people mean more opportunities for your organisation?

Replacing the dominant narrative

A client organisation this week told me about a pervasive rumour that was doing the rounds: staff could only access a significant salary benefit if they had a form signed by the former Chief Executive.

Problem is, she left the organisation months ago.

Did that fact stop the rumour? No.

We’ve always known that humans are susceptible to the ‘grapevine’. Sidebar: the term comes from the American Civil War in the 1860s, when telegraphy was in its infancy, and battle units communicated with wires strung up between trees, like ‘grapevines’. This primitive setup failed more often than it worked, leading to garbled communications which, of course, soldiers took as authoritative. Even today, some research cites that workers receive more than 50% of information about their employment from informal means.

What’s the solution?

In the absence of a sensible narrative, people fill the vacuum. So the answer is clear. Provide a replacement narrative. Then keep repeating it.

This organisation has to go out on the front foot spelling out that there is a new CEO. Her roles will include all functions of the prior CEO. The prior CEO is no longer authorised to do anything, Period. Repeat.

Question: What stories do you need to displace in your organisation?

Wasted

Uber makes billions of dollars each year on a simple value proposition: they’ve monetised the elimination of movement inefficiencies.

So far, they’ve applied this to urban ride-sharing and food deliveries. But, in future, watch out for how they’ll apply their movement data, routing algorithms and ability to gain permission to operate in highly regulated environments to other areas: global shipping and healthcare come to mind.

But Uber’s ability to apply basic capabilities to highly monetisable areas is nothing new.

Way back in 1900, Charles Potter, an Australian inventor, was having a quiet drink in the outback town of Broken Hill. Daydreaming, he watched the froth on top of his beer. But, his mind went somewhere else too.

He started musing about the waste he saw in mining: some 40% of silver, 30% of lead, and nearly all the zinc in mined ore was lost. In the pub that day, Potter’s epiphany was a ‘froth floatation process’ whereby fragments of finely ground ore ‘stick’ to bubbles and rise to the surface. The detail of his plan involved adding hot sulphuric acid to the tailings. The acid reacts with zinc, releases bubbles of carbon dioxide, which stick to the zinc and float it to the surface. The triumph was that 60% of the zinc available in the ore was recoverable.

But, Potter died just a few years later, bankrupted by his investment in his own invention. He now lies mostly forgotten, in a cemetery not too far from my house. However, a version of his process is still used globally, has saved incalculable millions of tons of ore from waste, and substantially enriched BHP and other mining giants.

Question: What ‘waste’ can you imaginatively re-purpose or prevent?

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Enjoy the week ahead, and I hope you can replace some (incorrect) dominant narratives in your world

See you next Friday,

Andrew