Ray Kurzweil famously stated in his law of accelerating returns in The Singularity Is Near - “In the next 100 years, and at the current rate, we will witness 20,000 years of progress. Or about one thousand times greater than that of the 20th Century.”The 21st Century is driving a truck through every business plan and every government policy. There’s a tidal wave of change drowning the traditional business and operating models - that’s true of every category and each sector. While change has always been with us, the exponential rate at which it is now gathering pace is having increasingly massive impact. The killer questions of How? Where? and What? can we do about it are preoccupying senior leaders and their executives like never before. Can you feel the urgency? No?
I can’t think of a single recent case where the unknown’s of developing a strategy have not far exceeded the known's. There is no certainty in all this. The terrain is far more treacherous - more fatal to the unwary than ever before. The fascinating bit of all this is that there has never been more opportunity either.
Think about it. As any market reaches maturity and fashion becomes tired and ordinary the new and the extraordinary is in immediate demand. The innovators can win, the entrepreneurs can sense the moment, the dreamers can achieve their dreams. In the blink of an eye a new product or service can catch fire. Sparked by the death of an old solution the new one is immediately king of the hill. Time is compressed, distribution is almost a given – it’s a commodity – if its good it’s out there. The world is available to the brightest of ideas and the only game in town is capability and imagination. Creativity. So how much of this do we not get? None right? So how much of this do we see people thinking differently about? Not many right? The Killer Questions
To survive, Businesses and Governments do not need more of the same thinking about change, strategy or transformation. They do not want or have time for yet another boring consultant with this or that methodology. It just won’t work. It ain’t gonna cut it. They need different thinking. That seems so obvious a statement and yet we witness every day how stuck or caught in the headlamps of the truck they are. New ways of tackling this tornado, this tsunami and this careering inevitability are required. How can we act differently? So what must we do differently? Now what will be different? Why is this the right kind of difference? Then they are on into When? Where? Who? Business wants to have answers to these big questions. The right answers if at all possible. Providing the right answers though is now as much an art as it is a science. It's subtle and therefore deceptively simple. Why are these questions so hard for so many to get their heads around? The Killer Application
Well we could be a lot better at doing the basics. We have found that the simple ways to solve complex issues can appear very hard to grasp and actually not that simple. This is a paradox around which we have to get to survive the 21st Century. Try these - Dialog amongst teams, visualization and telling an actual story that interests people. Make reasoned arguments and share meaning within a logical framework that everyone can see and engage in. This involves talking, listening, being creative and actually putting the outcomes into practice. Doesn’t this sound like common sense? It is. Where did it go?
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