The Age of the Connector

Forget the digital paradigm shift, think bigger. Forget new technologies and mechanics, times have moved on from celebrating the next kickstarter project and startup billionaire, its more essential.

55 years ago, Alvin Toffler wrote ‘Future Shock’ and shocked the world with the statement that the service industry is here to stay and that new types of businesses with new types of skillsets have created a new market and manufacturing has to deal with it. What he described in detail was the struggle of culture accepting this and making sense of all this in our heads.

About 200 years ago, industrial revolution had redefined the role of the individual within the world that was shaped through new tools and ways of thinking.

We can still see echoes of this manufacturing model to be at the heart of businesses.

We can still see companies struggling with the idea of seeing their business as a service.

Now we live in a connected world and things have changed again. Products have de-manifested themselves or turned into services. Services exist as connecting points within or across infrastructures and ecosystems. Ecosystems are products in themselves.

Who are the people, who can understand all this and see the future for what it should be? They are the connectors.

As much as linear computer code made way for object-oriented programming, music albums have atomised into songs, new financial currencies can be managed as a decentralised entities instead of a central bank. What is essentially important is not to be able to connect things, but to see which things to connect where and this is the very new thinking of the new generation, this is how our children will look at things.

There are already proposals to stop teaching kids facts, but rather teach them how to find their own learning tools and knowledge resources. Give a man a fish … teach him how to fish.

Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter, AirBNB, UBER, they all connect us to what we need to get connected to. The next generation of businesses and skillsets will need to not just get connected but be good at connecting the right things for the right reasons. We have left the era where the latest trend is a new mechanic, a connection and gimmick that shows a functionality, but doesn’t have a particular purpose. Yes, that’s why advertising is struggling as it left storytelling and people for cheap gimmicks. That’s why the museum industry has an annual trend like ‘being on Second Life’. That is why most companies are hiring people who know current mechanics, to improve and grow their business. But mechanics are not values and mechanics are a dozen for a given human behaviour to serve with a product and service.

We are slowly but surely leaving the era of the (mechanics) specialist for the era of the connector. The challenge is to value the connector more, quickly. Currently, when you apply for a job, people expect you to have done the same thing for years and only leads to people claiming having done UX for 15 years. This is insane and it needs a value shift in culture to acknowledge, that t-shaped and cross-disciplinary people are actually the ones making the real impact.

The Age of the Connector. A new way of thinking. Come on in, join the thinking.