Block chain — a technology pattern for the experience age
Forbes’ recent article about designing experiences rather than products suggests that we are entering the age of experience, and it reminds me of how Seth Godin helped usher in the product age with The Purple Cow, illustrating with terrific examples how marketing was soon to become embodied by, and largely indistinguishable from, the product itself.
Today, we go beyond this, designing rich human experiences, where a product or service offering serves merely as the nucleus of a highly contextualized experience or as the binding agent between multiple experiences.
Taxi apps like Flywheel (a company I helped start in 2008) and Uber are good examples of this trend. The app is just the glue that holds together a set of experiences. In Flywheel’s case, there is the experience of the taxi dispatcher, which the system serves as a cloud dispatch management offering; the experience of the taxi driver and the game of getting high ratings and service points to increase the chance of being selected for juicy fares; and the experience of the passenger, not just being able to see the car en route, but also the financial experience of not having to worry about paying when getting out of the cab.
APIs, cloud infrastructure, distributed databases — these are some of the technology patterns that serve this experience-based paradigm well. They are flexible, composable, reusable.
But now look what is happening.
As complex experiences become the norm, so too does the need for composable business. And this is where block chain (or more generally the replicated shared ledger) comes in.
From a systems-thinking point of view, the essence of a block chain or shared ledger is how it lets multiple, legally separate parties share the complete record of a set of state changes with assurance against tampering by anyone, including themselves, without any party actually controlling or owning the system that grants this assurance.
It is true that APIs are often sufficient in fusing services supplied by multiple parties into a single experience, but:
- As the number of providers goes up and the data interactions become denser and bleed into each other, a block chain can be employed to ensure integrity and deliver fine-grained, permanent traces of state changes to facilitate multi-party auditing and crediting;
- A block chain pattern is essential when the providers can not trust each other to know certain information about each other which must be used in tandem to make the user experience fluid, and where those providers would not countenance another party to manage that shared information for them.
For example, what if we added a service to Flywheel that granted the driver rebates on their insurance for high ratings? Well, the insurance company could create APIs for this, but it would be a lot of work and would require endpoint management for each company like Flywheel that integrates with the insurance company. As the insurance company, I don’t want anything to have a hair’s chance of tampering with or breaching my user data. Better if there were a system in the middle that were able to verifiably manage the changes between the driver review points and the rebate level without exposing systems of record to each other. But nobody wants to hand control of that system over to anyone else. This conundrum creates friction and slows the movement to this kind of deep service integration. Now add to this the idea of joining one’s permanent certification and identity to their behavior on Flywheel. Benefit: driver and passenger less likely to be serial killers. But who would want Flywheel or anyone else to be able to access or directly modify one’s permanent identity or driver certification, which could impact areas of one’s personal life far beyond driving or riding in a cab? Another conundrum.
These examples are just the tip of the iceberg. But they illustrate to a small degree a deep and abiding ‘human’ problem of trust and hegemony that will slow and sometimes stop the progress toward truly fluid, rich integrated experiences. When an experience requires the attributes of a centralized system from services provided by different parties, but no provider can allow another to control the center, you might be looking at a job for a block chain.