or some wild guesses about 2018....

(Note* For those of my friends who read this in the "hive" first, I get the irony of still publishing on linkedin given my growing disillusionment with it. What can I say!)

Well I hope everyone had a great Festive break and have returned to work full of renewed vigour, energy and enthusiasm for 2018. I've been off ill with the real "Aussie" flu (not man flu) since pre-new year so my "upbeatness" levels are still low as start to get back into the swing of things with only a few hours of work a day for the next week or so (Dr's advice!)

Hopefully my enthusiasm and energy will rise as I read the continuous stream of motivational soundbites and self congratulatory posts that now seem to dominate linkedin (and yes I've tried doing things to improve it - but I'm no match for the linkedin algorithm). If that doesn't cheer me then I know for a fact the picture of a first day desk will restore my faith in human nature :-).

Those of my friends and connections who know me, must by now have got the style of my writing. So I'm not going to even bother with the pre-amble and "don't read on if..." message that I occasionally use in intros....if on the other hand this is the first time you've ever stumbled across me then "hello, nice to meet you".

To the task in hand!!!

The advantage of lying in bed running a high temperature is it helped me decided that my first 2018 "rant" would built around those "prediction" lists. You know the ones. Gartner, Forrestor, IBM, etc feel compelled in December/January to publish their predictions. Setting out for their various followers what they believe is going to happen in the coming year (or two) thereby ensuring their wisdom is appreciated and shared across the world.

Like techno mystic megs (very old UK meme) they distill the wisdom of their analysts, thought leaders (what an arrogant presumption that is) and google searches into a list to help the captains of industry navigate their great ships through the waters of change.

So I decided to ask a bunch of friends within the Hive Expert Network for their own predictions and then collated, ignored and tinkered with the results. Yes it's tongue in cheek (I hope) but also when I looked at it, it made me think it's probably about as accurate as insightful as the lists which take themselves seriously.

Feel free to add your own to the list and Happy New Year Folks.

BITCOIN...

The world will continue to be divided into those people who deeply and genuinely really do understand wtf cryptocurrencies are all about and how and why they're not another bubble (lets call this group one). Others will pretend to understand bitcoin deeply (group two), and during conversation will nod and say things like "blockchain", "miners", "encryption" "Ethereum" and for the most part get away with it unless they encounter someone from group one (which is rare) - a large proportion of CIO's will secretly acknowledge they are in this group, but fortunately their peers are in the group below...

Group three... will look at groups one and two and ignore them completely whilst continuing to pay for everything using credit cards, debit cards, paypal, their phone or very occasionally...cash. Some of them will have heard that their plumber is now worth ￡4.8m because he once changed a stop valve for bitcoins. In fact all sorts of folks will share how they made ridiculous sums of money riding the bitcoin wave and many websites will appear explaining how the "common man" can still ride the wave.

The richest have already got out before it all goes totally wrong and when it all implodes the Daily ***insert your choice of newspaper*** will call for stiff penalties for bitcoin fraudsters. From the ashes something that can be explained and is useful to normal people will emerge and will save the banks money and enable them to reduce headcount. (on a personal note I'm lurking in group two btw and avoid a couple of the hivemind expert members who are in group one)

AGILE...

Oh poor, poor, old agile. From those heady days of its beautiful manifesto it will continue to swell into a great tortured and twisted beast of frameworks, wind and noise. Every reasonable sized company across the world will have some version of the agile word used in their business regardless of what they're actually doing. Many will see no difference in cost, quality or speed of deployment of their software. Arguments will rage about the definition of done and MVP and eventually undaunted they'll hire large slow conventional companies to advise them what they're doing wrong or experts who've "done a course" at the Holiday Inn with Jeff.

Worryingly a hard core and underground agile network will emerge in late August, made up of uncompromising agile coaches who will end up being listed as an illegal group likely to commit acts of business terrorism such as kidnapping Programme Managers, Project Managers, Heads of PMO and Feckless Senior Executives (FSE's) in an attempt to stop the bastardisation of their beautiful and elegant vision. The Agile Wars will be painful and run through till 2021.

Eventually during 2019, agile will be absorbed into most companies Enterprise Mediocrity Platform (EMP) from which very little ever escapes, not even hope. On a positive note a few organisations will escape the EMP event horizon and start to see real potential and harmony afforded by balanced, high performance teams morphing and adapting to deliver continuous business value. The five companies involved will get a beer together one night in late October.

DESIGN THINKING...

Design thinking will start to be used in all sorts of ways and due to its inherently useful and fun appeal it will start to become the next "big thing". People in IDEO will smile at this in a sad and knowing fashion, given that they've been doing it for nearly 30 years. The agile community will debate whether or not it's a friend or enemy, with the underground agile cell potentially adding "design thinkers" to their hit list.

In a similar way to agile, the simple clean elegance of the design thinking process will begin to have multiple "enhancements" and "models" added most of which will eventually turn it into an inception phase for agilistas and leave the original design thinking folks thinking about forming a design thinking business terror cell.

Eventually towards the end of 2018 it will be obvious to anyone that can use design thinking and agile that there are loads of synergies and similarities that help make things a little better, even Enterprise Architects will find it fun and interesting and seek to incorporate it into TOGAF 14 to remove the fun elements. Just as this is all recognised the very big consulting (VBC) firms will package it all up and help move it into the EMP (see previous) whilst Jeff will now offer a two day design thinking training course in the Holiday Inn in September for only ￡200 per candidate.

INTERNET OF THINGS...

Lots of exciting things here with people continuing to see the possibilities realised by having fridges talking to cars, toasters and other things. The telcos will create more life affirming digital videos showing nordic types living and working in minority report style homes. People who've never experienced the horror of BT's speech recognition help line or fallen into an infinite "cancel/return" loop in Amazon (seriously it does exist!) will view these videos with hope and wonderment and share them with their aging male dominated boards as a sign of what's coming. The board will appoint a digital transformation director to "sort things out".

Around about 2022 loads of us who've only just avoided been killed by rogue toasters or hacked self driving fridges will wish we had listened to all the security specialists in 2018. The IoT will drive rapid growth in the self loathing and ironically unaware online Luddite communities.

IT DEPARTMENTS...

Gartner's on-going yearly prediction of versatilists inheriting the IT world (first made in 1947) will get another airing. Once a core community of people with English accents have figured how to actually pronounce the word everyone will nod sagely that it doesn't sound unreasonable and then get on with work. Bolstered by this Shakespearean success of launching another non-word into the world of IT, Gartner will re-brand and re-launch pi-modal as an answer for coping with a chaotic and dissonant world filled with fake news and teetering on the bring of madness. The long dead and ugly multi-modal war re-starts.

Forrestor will share again, how the CIO needs to be an integral part of the business and an entrepreneurial thinker. People will nod and agree in particular those CIO's who possess neither skill set. A few really really smart companies will come up with a completely different type of IT model (seriously this last one is actually true we're working on it with some of the hive client side members...really interesting)

INNOVATION...

will continue to be the "new black" throughout 2018 and many good companies will indeed start to understand and appreciate the fabulous opportunities afforded by new technologies, new ways of working, building immersive and engaging experiences from a "person's perspective" - truly getting into what people (customer, workers, suppliers) really would like (through observation and data lakes, rivers, streams and reservoirs) and re-structure themselves accordingly.

Things like voice and visual search will be in the "isn't that bleeding obvious" category to people aged 11. For many not so good companies they'll get frustrated why their innovation lab hasn't delivered the results they'd expected/predicted and then "let some people go" whilst talking about "embracing failure" in their annual report.

THE BOARD ROOM...

will continue to look similar for 95% of companies. A few CIO's will swap the "I" to mean Improvement, Information or Innovation depending on whether their CEO feels it's useful or has just read "Fast Company". The digital transformation word will start to diminish a bit amongst the most switched on companies as they realise it's just life and what "existing" in 2018 is about.

Edgy concepts like Holocracy will continue to attract listeners and followers but not many doers in larger organisations. Clever smart folks who understand that organisations really do need to change the way they work will find ways of making this happen through behavioral psychology and subtle models of change - they probably won't call themselves the HR dept.

SELF DRIVING CARS...

More manufacturers will continue to talk about this than ever before and most people won't pay too much attention until finally sometime in 2025 we'll be able to get into our car, say "take me to the pub" and have a read of our kindle on the way. Only fly in this ointment for UK is that the current UK Government suggested it would be 2021 - so applying our usual delivery track record in technology when government is involved it's probably going to be around 2030?

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE...

A late but really important entry. 2018 is a big year for AI and any company able to combine the blockchain word and AI in their prospectus will see their share value triple (I've registered HiveBlockAI.com already). So all the investment pouring into this field will see AI permeating every part of our lives from personal assistants on our mobile, with fabulous voice recognition through to ever more intelligent chatbots to interact with. The level of sophistication will mean my standard question when on a chat form of "am I talking to a real person?" won't be enough (I do seriously always ask this now). As visual management capabilities also improve we'll see more and more people holding their phones up to a situation so that Cortana can explain what they're seeing and provide context and meaning to image.

Linkedin's own AI algorithms will help ensure that they'll know before the person themselves that they want to leave their current job and pursue a new life in fly-fishing. The ability to simply message a friend will be removed as linkedin will pre-assess what we're going to say and decided it's of interest to them first (oh wait that's already true!) The gap between Black Mirror and real life will be negligible and super scary!

LINKEDIN...

this one had us beat other than what we said above. Possibly Oleg V will take over all content, groups will become useful again, as I say - who knows....

I need to stop!!!!

OK - I know it's a short list and of the loads of different and fun things folks sent in I ended up just pulling out those that I liked - seems fair! If you've others, then smashing, feel free to share them or not as the case maybe, equally if you consider yourself and expert in your area and would like to have interesting conversations in a different place than linkedin then please drop me a connection request and join me over in the Hive. It's got no first day desk pics, just some really likable, smart people helping each other grow and support their businesses.