Skate to where the puck is going…

Wayne Gretzky, former Professional Canadian ice hockey player, once recalled what he had been taught when learning the game; “Skate to where the puck is going, not where it has been…” Instead of chasing what’s already happened, try to get a step ahead and move to the next play! 

There’s a fine line between balancing the current needs of our customers and partners while focusing forward and playing 3 steps ahead the same time. Businesses are prone to manage based on what has happened, or at best what is happening. Its tough to justify spending energy looking and projecting what is likely to happen next when you are busy firefighting. And while timing is everything, even the best laid plans can’t account for all curveballs.

Skating to where the puck will be is a metaphor for moving to a position in anticipation, of being able to intercept said puck and control the play. You need to be able to read the field – your team, the opposition, understand your abilities, understand the conditions and visualise the outcome, while in motion, wearing blades on ice.

The alternative is to chase to puck around the rink, always behind, rarely in front, while the play makers dictate the game. Sometimes things end up in the right place by accident, but when it comes to managing resources and building inertia behind certain projects or product lines, then there is little room for uncertainty - you need to know where you are heading.

In my last post , I talked of roadmaps being a useful way to collaborate and facilitate conversation amongst customers, enabling our teams to move along a path with clarity. A roadmap viewed from a high enough elevation can give you an indication of where we think the elusive puck will be, it’s our best guess.

The roadmap gives us the ability to focus on the task at hand while at the same time allowing us to swing to the next rung – but we need to first know what that destination is. In a service-based industry, there are numerous factors which influence what the future landscape looks like, most of which are out of our control.

We could use the Michael Porter ‘5 forces model’ as a framework for analysing the forces that shape our industry, its strengths, weaknesses and competitive advantage (Competition in the Industry, New entrants, Suppliers, Customers and the Threat of substitute forces).

Another useful perspective on understanding where that puck may be, is to think about where the intersection of customer attention and technological advance may be by using existing predictive studies and analysis based on trends in today’s cultural and societal norms. However, one needs to be aware of the hype cycle, not just within our industry but in the wider landscape too.

For example, the image below is of Gartner’s Hype Cycle for Digital Commerce (2019). Which categories do your existing and planned products and services fall into? Hopefully you are entering the long tailed “plateau of productivity”. Likewise, there are hype cycles around themes such as AI, Marketing CRMs, Security and Risk and other industry specific sectors which may be of interest to you and your business.

Gartner also published their 10 Strategic Technology Trends; hot trends that will impact the future of digital commerce which can be used to provide some indication of where the market is likely to trend:

Trend No 1. Hyperautomation. The application of advanced technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), to increasingly automate processes and augment humans. 

Trend No. 2: Multiexperience. For example, Domino’s Pizza created an experience beyond app-based ordering that includes autonomous vehicles, a pizza tracker and smart speaker communications. 

Trend No. 3: Democratization of technology. Providing people with easy access to technical or business expertise without extensive (and costly) training.

Trend No. 4: Human augmentation. Human augmentation is the use of technology to enhance a person’s cognitive and physical experiences.

Trend No. 5: Transparency and traceability. The evolution of technology is creating a trust crisis. As consumers become more aware of how their data is being collected and used, organisations are also recognising the increasing liability of storing and gathering the data. 

Trend No. 6: The empowered edge. A topology where information processing and content collection and delivery are placed closer to the sources of the information, with the idea that keeping traffic local and distributed will reduce latency. This includes all the technology on the Internet of Things (IoT).

Trend No. 7: The distributed cloud. Allows data centres to be located anywhere. This solves both technical issues like latency and regulatory challenges like data sovereignty. It also offers the benefits of a public cloud service alongside the benefits of a private, local cloud. 

Trend No. 8: Autonomous things. Things, which include drones, robots, ships and appliances, exploit AI to perform tasks usually done by humans. This technology operates on a spectrum of intelligence ranging from semi autonomous to fully autonomous and across a variety of environments including air, sea and land.

Trend No. 9: Practical blockchain. Blockchain is a type of distributed ledger, an expanding chronologically ordered list of cryptographically signed, irrevocable transactional records shared by all participants in a network. 

Trend No. 10: AI security. Evolving technologies such as hyperautomation and autonomous things offer transformational opportunities in the business world. However, they also create security vulnerabilities in new potential points of attack. Security teams must address these challenges and be aware of how AI will impact the security space. 

Where we think the puck is going is subjective, depending on the game we are playing. In Game Theory there are two kinds of games: finite and infinite.

Finite games have fixed rules and culminate with a winner and a loser. In the finite game of being ‘number 1’, who decides what the measurement is? Is it based on revenue? Market share? Number of products? Over what time frame?

The objective of infinite games is to perpetuate the game, keeping it going as long as we can. Those of us who play the infinite game do so to make our work better than the work we produced before.

The finite game is to win, the infinite game is to play to stay in the game. It is a subtle difference but one that has huge ramifications when choosing which direction we think we ought to be skating.

But what about our take on trends and predictions? Last December, Ingenico published several posts which looked to the future, anticipating where that puck may be moving to in 2020 and beyond. I would particularly recommend our video predictions on Smart Cities, Invisible Payments, Data Driven Marketing and IOT and Connected Devices.

In Summary: Skating to where we believe the puck may be is not an easy thing to do. It involves a combination of advice, experience, metrics, the right company culture, stakeholder buy-in and awareness of the evolving hype cycles. The voice of the customer, industry trends, technological breakthrough and your company’s talent stack are all factors which need to be considered.

But ultimately, it depends on the type of game you are wanting to play.