Humans: a case for the opposition

Posted by mattpoy on October 14, 2016 Posted in Future of Technology, Future of Work, People, People Skills Talent, Skills, Talent, Technology Tagged Future of work, Future Technology, People, Robots, Skills, Talent

The Future of Jobs report from the World Economic Forum highlighted that over 7m jobs will be lost to redundancy, automation or disintermediation, although they did also state that some of this loss will be offset by 2m jobs in new areas.

We know that as industries evolve and technology puts its arms around a business model and disrupts it, that jobs are created elsewhere, just as retail and services have replaced the factory and manufacturing, so the message to us as employers is invest in the skills of our people, rather than hire more workers, as the key to managing disruptions to the labour market long-term.

Jobs aren’t going away, they’re just changing. We know that softer skills like empathy, communications and prioritisation are essentially human. The future of work is not about jobs going away, it’s about redesigning what we do to make better use of the tools and technology at our disposal.

My point? Robots and technology are already in place. They trade on the stock markets, they drive cars in some cities and they are persistently recommending what we buy next. What they can’t do is serve the delicious loaves of bread in St Albans market with a chat on a Saturday morning or provide that extra bit of care and attention when you’re not feeling at your best – so work with the humans in our teams to find the things they are good at, the tasks and roles that require thinking, judgement and emotion.

Finally, is Nike really launching self-tying shoelaces on sneakers/trainers? Isn’t learning to tie a shoelace an important step in our childhood?

Technology and impatience

Posted by mattpoy on August 30, 2016August 30, 2016 Posted in Big Data, Customer Service, Future of Technology, Technology Tagged Customer Service, Data, Engagement, Future Technology, Futurology

We are losing patience with technology and it is putting pressure on companies to provide services at record speeds, yet it seems as though it is never enough.

I always felt one of the greatest wonders of technological change was how organisations put services into the hands of the customer and we marvelled at this as great service – for example, checking ourselves in for a flight and printing our own boarding passes. They made us do the work and we thanked them for it.

I use a 10-second video to make my case of a young girl less than a year old who is given a copy of a magazine to keep her occupied. Within moments she is swiping the magazine because she thinks it operates like an iPad and when the magazine shows no sign of responding, the girl is crawling away having lost interest.

Today, the tables are turning on technology and we are becoming ever more unsatisfied – I thought technology was supposed to be the next utility but when Wifi was down for a while at the house this weekend it caused much consternation and one of kids declared they “couldn’t function.” When networks are down, we criticise the technology, when a store runs out of a product, we complain that they haven’t mastered big data and when online banking is not available we ask why they couldn’t update their systems when we are asleep.

I have seen “internet”, “wifi” and “phone battery” all added to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and it isn’t always in jest. It is one thing technology progressing leaps and bounds to give us new ways of working and shopping and learning – but can it match our ever-increasing standards?

Be a hedgehog

Posted by mattpoy on June 21, 2016June 21, 2016 Posted in Future of Technology, Future of Work, Ideas, People Skills Talent Tagged Future of work, Future Technology, People, Skills, Talent

The CEO of Salesforce, Marc Benioff said “Speed is the new currency of business.” It certainly is, and the rate of change continues to disregard political upheaval to drive ahead.

The adoption rates for recent technologies are almost vertical – social media, smartphones, tablets to name but three – and the pace of disruption staggering. For every 100 people in the world there are now 95 mobile phone subscriptions and 40 internet users, plus new apps are reaching 100 million users increasingly quickly WhatsApp in 3 years and Instagram in 2).

So how do we take control of this change? We do it via filtering and through our people. Angela Ahrendts, former CEO of Burberry and now head of Apple Retail, states:

“The more technologically advanced our society becomes, the more we need to go back to the basic fundamentals of human communication”

It is very easy to get distracted and pulled from pillar to post, especially as we suffer from information overload, overflowing Inboxes and streams of messaging via apps. So my route to handling this, which applies both to myself as well as my team, is to be a hedgehog.

The hedgehog only does a few simple things, but it does it with a laser focus. The fox on the other hand, changes plans and strategy to try and catch the hedgehog, but almost never does.

So be a hedgehog: define what you are good at, and deliver it with increasing quality and a bucket-load of passion.

A return to simplicity

Posted by mattpoy on March 7, 2016March 7, 2016 Posted in Big Data, Future of Technology, Ideas, Marketing, Technology Tagged Future Technology, Futurology, Ideas, Marketing

Technology is no silver bullet and better technology doesn’t automatically mean better education.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) found that across more than 40 countries, students who use computers for their schoolwork, but for a slightly lower-than-average amount of time, do better than average on reading exams. Students who spend an above-average amount of time on computers at school scored lower than students who don’t use computers at all. Like everything, how helpful technology is depends on how you use it.

It has also been highlighted how job roles that require empathy, for example doctors and nurses, are better positioned to withstand the changes that technology is sweeping along its path, and with 36% of the workforce in jobs that have a high risk of being automated by 2030 (via a study by Oxford University) we need to de-mystify the confusion and complexity that technology often brings to our day-to-day existence.

This leads me to a paragraph of hope – during my recent travels I read about the declining numbers of subscribers to cable television. Executives in the industry believe “skinny bundles” might be one solution to halt this decline, and I picked up on that – wouldn’t skinny everything help us in the long term? Offer consumers a menu of options and let us piece together only what suits us – move us from mass production to mass customisation.

That way we get what we need, we are satisfied with what we pay, and we don’t spend hours filtering through unnecessary material. Or maybe we just shut down the TV networks at 10:30pm and ask society to read a book for 30 minutes before falling asleep.

Think Different

Posted by mattpoy on December 11, 2015December 11, 2015 Posted in Big Data, Future of Technology, Future of Work, Ideas Tagged Data, Future of work, Future Technology, Futurology

‘Think Different’ was created in 1997 to promote Apple, and what a company and set of products they turned out to be. The statement itself is never more relevant than today.

Because of the pace that everybody works, always connected, never stopping for breath, technology has allowed some companies to become lazy, their staff converted to order processors and order takers. But that doesn’t last forever.

How about using technology to buy time in our schedule, to give us 10% of our week back to think differently, strategically and long-term? Forrester tell us that 95% of data within organisations remains untapped and 40% of companies don’t target specific customer or visitor segments. How about using technology to create market segments of one and treating customers (and learners) as individuals with unique needs.

Segmentation is a key step toward meeting customers’ demands for more relevant experiences, and by 2018, Gartner predicts that organisations that excel in personalisation will outsell those that don’t by 20%. It’s the treadmill scenario – in this rapidly changing world, if you standstill, you go backwards.

Benefits of staying small

Posted by mattpoy on November 17, 2015November 17, 2015 Posted in Big Data, Future of Technology, Future of Work, Skills Tagged Data, Future Technology, Skills

In 1983, Theodore Levitt, economist and professor at Harvard, encouraged companies to “Think Global, Act Local,” as part of their globalisation strategy. Today that message is reinforced as we are told to stay small and nimble, and keep our ears to the ground by staying in touch with our customers and the wider marketplace (social spaces and listening to the conversation).

Technology allows us to do this, and yet a Forrester report highlighted that 95% of data within organisations remains untapped – we need to understand how to put this data to good use, and create market segments of one! One customer, unique needs.

I worked on a skills project with a global consulting firm who said that for the first time in history, customers are joined arm-in-arm with CEOs in setting strategy for their companies. The goalposts have moved. In a 2015 study that promoted 5 key digital marketing trends, Gartner stated that the purchasing funnel has been fundamentally broken – customers have moved from a discreet linear purchasing path to moving at their pace, when and wherever they want to. They also talk about the experience economy, and that we have to think less in terms of discreet steps in a standard campaign and instead think of every interaction over time as the experience.

We have to put technology to use, to facilitate and analyse this for us or we stand still, and today that means going backwards.

The world’s new language

Posted by mattpoy on October 14, 2015 Posted in Future of Technology, Future of Work, Marketing, Small Business Tagged Future of work, Future Technology, Futurology, Marketing

More often than not, the most powerful messages are the shortest.

I think this is one of the statements of the year: the world’s language isn’t English or Chinese. It’s pictorial. It’s how the next gen engage, it’s how they communicate, it’s how they understand.

It’s time we learned to speak it.

The Number 1 Skill for the 21st Century: Empathy

Posted by mattpoy on September 1, 2015September 1, 2015 Posted in Future of Technology, Future of Work, People, People Skills Talent, Skills Tagged Future of work, Future Technology, People, Skills

left brain right brain I read an interesting story recently of a company that dismissed a very competent technician because he lacked the soft skills that was in keeping with their twenty-first century thinking. I delved deeper.

A vice president at a global IT company proclaimed, “Empathy is the critical 21^st century skill.” I agree with that, but has it really changed over time? The CEO for Retail Banking at Barclays said in a television interview that the internet and digitisation agenda is bigger than the industrial revolution. People are not designed to do the same thing again and again, and that we must utilise people where it requires the mind and the application of judgement.

Research by Oxford Economics asked employers what skills they will need most in the next 5 to 10 years and they said they will not be looking for business acumen or analysis, but instead their priorities will be relationship building, teaming and creativity.

I think this is great news – the left-brain roles and functions will be taken over by technology anyway, so we can go back to using more of our right-brain in social interaction and doing what differentiated us in the first place: being human.

Education must be relevant

Posted by mattpoy on July 6, 2015July 6, 2015 Posted in Education, Future of Technology, Skills Tagged Education, Future Technology, Skills

Building Blocks A number of clients are strategising around the skills gap topic – building education to meet a new-world, technology-led demand of smaller, bite-size modules of learning.

Technology allows us to read, watch videos and learn on a commute to work, so learning has to satisfy this new way that consumers digest content. But what is critical is that the outcomes of this education must be recognised by employers as having relevancy in the workplace. I recall my days at technology association CompTIA, working closely with Dell, Intel and others to build programmes that related directly to the job roles and the work – to help their people make an immediate contribution.

Tesco worked with us to develop a certification programme to upskill their store staff as part of a strategy to grab market share in the retail electronics marketplace – and they did it impressively, by building learning-plus-certification that had currency in their sector.

As we are in Wimbledon season, it is appropriate to mention the tennis. Especially in the early rounds, the tournament offers up mismatches in competition, but in the skills arena, it is as evident as it ever was – millions unemployed across Europe and yet employers have 4m vacancies that remain unfilled. We have to address it.