Anyone who claims they can see the future needs to explain why they aren’t the richest person on the planet.
Certainly last year no one predicted what 2020 had in store for us — might have been nice to get a heads up! This inability to consult the Oracle of Delphi means that tomorrow's business is a guessing game. And that, in turn, means we’ll tend be slow and careful. And when we’re making business changes or investments, it’s hard to look more than a year or two out. We’re planning for next year, and in turn we’re expecting results and impacts next year too. Which makes it tough when we start talking about long term culture or process or sales changes. And if we’re being honest, no business initiative that truly makes a difference paid dividends right away. Just ask anyone who’s lived through an SAP implementation.
One of my favorite predictions of all time came when I’d just started my first job in the industry and was in a meeting with the VP of IT (in the late nineties that was as big a role as you got). And this individual predicted that the internet would amount to nothing, it was just a passing fad, and we had no need to consider how we could use it to our advantage. We didn’t even need a website—websites were going nowhere. I don’t know what happened to him, but if I did want to know, I could always check LinkedIn or just Google him.
The noise of everyday work and the distractions that brings means we live 99% of our work days in the moment. And if we do get a little bit of headspace we sit back and think about next year. However, I’d challenge everyone to find half an hour on their calendar and sit back and do nothing. Let your mind wander. The mind is an amazing thing — when you let it off the leash it can formulate all kinds of new ideas and paths and connections. Our brains are always trying to tell us things but in this modern era we don’t have the same ability to listen. We have phones and emails and the internet to keep us in the engaged state. Rarely do we just sit and ponder. Even driving we can’t let out minds drift (although with some drivers I think they’ve found a way). So set your task list to doing nothing, sit back and think about the big question — where will this business be in ten years?
If your first response is, "I’ll be retired," then you’re not the right mind. Find the people who’ll be in your seat and have them start this. Ideally set a future foundation team – a group that meets every couple of weeks for a period of time thinking about what ten years from now will look like for the company. Just let them go—sit and think and discuss and meander—because this won’t come quickly. And while they won’t be able to predict what’s going to happen, they will be able to predict what should happen. And if you ask anyone who’s been successful in life, they’ll tell you first they knew where they were going.
Ultimately there are some truths that will emerge, just like the internet was always going to become important even if folks couldn’t see how. And for us two truths are barreling towards us: one, the next generation won’t think or work like previous generations; and two, data analysis will become the cornerstone of business decisions. Moreso, it’ll become a tool used continually, every single day, by almost every employee.
So what does all this mean? It means if our workforce from 2030 could speak to us today they’d be talking about their immediate access to data to answer almost any business-related question. Where an order might be, what’s in stock, the price of an item, the history of a customer's purchases, the technical details of a product, and related or replacement products. Everything immediately accessible on a tablet device that replaced computers years ago. Much of that we’re close to already, but how can we do it faster, better, easier?
Jobs would be easily transferrable, with employees becoming more flexible to meet business needs. Operations one day, sales the next, counter or outside as needed. Conducting their jobs would be simplified as more and more processes rely on automation and software. Staff would become multi-functional rather than siloed in particular areas. Responses would be more predictable, and the training cycle would be greatly shortened.
Businesses would need to become more diversified to stay competitive. Increases in services, in product lines represented, in applications, and range of companies you can serve. This in turn requires most staff to be familiar with the company's capabilities and terms of service, which suggests more on-the-spot information retrieval rather than learning by rote. Retail is a good example of this, with most stores having staff always stay updated with new information, considering how dynamic some product ranges can be. Try and buy a new phone and watch how the staff look up everything they need to know.
And the customers themselves would change, requiring more self-serve access to information rather than the time awaiting responses by email or phone. They’ll be more data hungry, working in their own acute data-driven environment. Think about our own lives right now. Most of our daily retail services life has been changed to information retrieval and self serve, rather than a phone and inquiry. You book appointments with plumbers and landscapers. Do your own banking, manage your own stocks. While it might have been the habit to work with an insurance agent and walk through all the steps for a new policy, for younger generations it’s all done without speaking to a human being. Access to your business history, your pricing and replacement products, the details of lot shipments and different projects will all need to be had within 4-5 thumb presses on your phone. When everyone is selling the same products, it’s this battleground that will make the difference.
When my father started school back in Ireland he used a slate and a piece of chalk in the classroom. When my son started kindergarten recently he had his own top-of-the-line laptop. They’re both doing the same thing—learning reading and writing, how to count, how the world works—but their methods are so different that one couldn’t even consider the other's way of life. That’s a vision that neither could predict, but if my father could imagine what the future of education was going to look like, it’d be what his grandson is experiencing right now.
So take some time, disconnect from work, and start thinking about the long term future. Think of what your company is destined to become—start with the end and then work back. Without an eye on the horizon, you’re just running with the current, and you’ll never get where you want to be.
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