Peter F. Drucker famously said, “The best way to predict the future is to create it.”
In our last post, we said that the old axiom still holds if we are dealt the same hand: it’s the ability of your people and what they do together to bring about change.
And 19-year-old Liza Goldberg is a shining beacon of that in action. It’s not every day that a college student partners with one of the biggest tech companies in the world to help them release a new feature to help us see climate change in action. It’s a hot topic (pun intended).
We live in an age of abundance, yet one that’s rampant with skepticism and conspiracy theories. It’s easy to dismiss facts and figures. We see that play out around us, to sometimes disastrous consequences. But when your eyes and brain can see time-lapse images with something that three billion of us have in our pockets at any given moment with something as ubiquitous as Google Earth to demonstrate that change, well, that’s halfway to the moon in the exosphere.
https://blog.google/products/earth/timelapse-in-google-earth/
Or what about the team at Nasa that successfully launched the first powered aircraft into flight on another planet yesterday, Tuesday, April 20th, with a helicopter on Mars. It was only 39 seconds long and 10 feet in the air, but symbolically, it even contained wing remnants from the Wright Brothers’ first aircraft, which took place in 1903 at Kitty Hawk.
So back to Drucker’s famous line: “The best way to predict the future is to create it.”
How does that play out around us, and specifically around transforming business?
76% of the world’s CEOs thought their business model would be unrecognizable in 5 years’ time. That was a study that Accenture released before COVID.
A crisis is a terrible thing to waste, as the cliche goes. Some companies have risen to the challenge and used technology in ways never thought possible before, while others have lacked the capabilities to pivot.
Case in point, between 2015 and 2018, companies that were innovating and leading with digital capabilities grew at twice the rate of laggards. That number has catapulted to five times as fast as laggards. That’s a 3x increase.
What about product-led growth and enterprise deployment cycles? Old assumptions are being challenged here too. A government organization shattered that last winter when COVID hit, and the NHS deployed video communications platform, Microsft Teams, to 1.2 million employees.
If we’re to accept the notion that we now live in a world of perpetual change, are fast followers irrelevant? Do we need to define and create the future for us to succeed?
If the future is predicated on more interoperability between systems to ideate, tinker, test and adapt, the line between IT systems and architecture and business strategy is blurred. To me, this was the other piece of information that stood out in Accenture’s report this year, and Canadian executives indexed more strongly here than elsewhere, too, with the assumption that technology democratization is becoming critical to their ability to innovate. So it stands to reason that the ability to take advantage of those new solutions and monetize them plays back to one’s revenue and go-to-market opportunity, and in turn quote to cash strategy. Flexibility and agility are key.
There are plenty of Liza’s with extraordinary empathy to harness technology that can help shape opinions and influence us. You may not have access to Google Earth, but we all have a canvas. Start by giving them a brush.