Translating blockchain: Turning complexity into useful services and applications
The world is turning into an ever more complex place. We often hear that opinion voiced in one way or the other across office corridors, at the regulars’ table and in newspaper feuilletons. In search of the roots of this sentiment, which has been a feature of private and public discourse for the past decades and possibly centuries, one can’t get around technological innovation. Ever since the invention of writing the world continues to evolve from the concrete to the abstract. Accompanied by large-scale dynamics (namely globalization and individualization) growing complexity is a core feature of technological evolution per se. So complexity is best seen as a gradual and long-lasting process that is not going to reverse any time soon.
Complexity refers to a larger context that is very difficult or even impossible to disassemble into its singular (moving) components. Digital technology is a manifestation of complexity par excellence. Compare, for example, the simplicity of a manual typewriter to hand-held computers that we call smartphones nowadays. Or look at the development of the automobile from a mechanical object into a software-driven vehicle that will drive autonomously in the near future. More generally speaking, much that used to be mechanized is now computerized and sooner or later will be automated.
The growing relevance of digital technology across all social and business domains is based on the complex relationships between hardware, software, infrastructures, devices and business models. Even if you cherish a tech-minimalist approach, your service or product is related to digital technology in one way or another. In this scenario it is challenging for corporations to keep their knowledge relevant, skill set up-to-date, let alone to predict what’s going to happen next. The sections to come discuss various dimensions of this phenomenon by looking at recent developments in the blockchain field.
Handling complexity
Advanced training courses, consulting, and the notion of lifelong learning flourish for good reasons: Cycles of innovation tend to speed up, new players push into formally clearly marked business sectors and established players expand or reprioritize their portfolio. As a response to these disruptive tendencies corporations redesign their working methods and environments. Another frequent reaction is to establish new scopes of activities. Chief Technology Officers (CTO) have turned into an integral part of the executive-level management team and it is no longer uncommon to meet with Chief Innovation Officers (CIO) or Chief Digital Officers (CDO).
At the same time, with digital technology becoming omnipresent, satisfying client expectations and putting the user as a human being into the center of attention continues to gain weight across industries. One of the most obvious consequences thereof is that users have become accustomed to the idea that they don’t have to bother with the underlying technical setup of the applications, platforms and services they use. Think of online banking: Most users have no clue how it technically works but they know very well why they use it and know exactly what happens when they hit the transfer button. Users expect sophisticatedly designed interfaces — to the point where they need no more than their voice to navigate intuitively through digital environments. Similarly, business partners and clients expect to be put in a comfortable place, in safe distance to the often cryptic and time-consuming technological details.
So, while the functioning of digital technology is about complexity and opacity, user experiences as well as client and business relations are ideally defined by simplicity and directness. This somewhat paradoxical development is a manifestation of technology getting calmer, as Mark Weiser and John Seele Brown already put it in the 1990s during their days at Xerox Parc. When everything runs smoothly the technical functioning is at no point at the center of attention. Even when malfunctions occur and technology temporarily looses its calm clients and users won’t be confronted with the actual complexity of a given technical system. They either find an easy fix, contact an expert that deals with the issue or, in the worst case, stop using the application at all.
Translating blockchain
The trend that increasingly complex systems need to be put into easy-to-use and easy-to-handle frameworks has serious consequences for the implementation and mass adaptation of emerging technologies. Put bluntly, only user-friendly and easy-to-manage tools will make it. This is particularly interesting when we look at one of the most debated techs at the moment: Blockchain — the next BIG THING everyone talks about, but only a few have experienced in action thus far. Expectations in the peer-to-peer technology’s ability to solve all kinds of fundamental issues are high. Besides more obvious uses in the finance and insurance industry blockchain is a technology predestined to modify whole ecosystems. Valuable writings and reports from a variety of stakeholders discuss, for example, the relevance of blockchain solutions for different strands of governance, data management in the public sector and even the cannabis industry.
Interestingly enough, the blockchain 101 is not too hard to grasp. Consider, for example, Marco Iansiti and Karim Lakhani’s helpful overview of five underlying principles that blockchain is based on:
- a distributed database (accessible by all involved parties)
- peer-to-peer transmission (direct communication between peers)
- transparency (each node has a unique alphanumeric address)
- irreversibility of records (approved transactions cannot be altered)
- and computational logic (digital transactions can be programmed and automatically triggered).
Yet, once we get into the needy greedy of how blockchain as a peer-to-peer architecture that sits on top of the internet works, it get’s rather tricky. The underlying technologies — including advanced cryptographic protocols — tend to be so complex that it needs some serious computational skills to accomplish viable blockchain-based products and realistic longer-term business opportunities. Now add to this the astonishingly fast-moving developments in the field — there is already talk about the convergence of machine learning and blockchain. No wonder that there is a shortage of developers who are capable of implementing robust blockchain solutions. Having said this, thorough engineering is only the starting point for introducing blockchain projects on a larger scale.
Making blockchain solutions manageable and beneficial for everyday users to a large degree relies on good design. One of the reasons why blockchain has not yet hit the high street is that it is largely under-designed so far. There are constructive starting points on how to design for blockchain as designers are taking up opportunities to define the look and feel of an emerging tech. Blockchain is all over the place when it comes to imaginaries related to market trends, political impacts, and social implications. It is, however, rarely put into intuitive and accurate applications so far.
Finally, when we think lifting user numbers and experiences in the context of blockchain we are eventually talking about the persuading translation of abstract computing processes into valuable and convincing services. Blockchain is most valuable when implemented as a thought-through ecosystem. This is a challenging endeavor, best resolved through the unification of tech expertise, design and communication.
Blockchain as a foundational technology
What blockchain actually looks like under the hood might interest some. What everyone definitely wants to know is: What’s the advantage?
What the internet did for communications, I think #blockchain will do for trusted transactions. Ginni Rometty, CEO @IBM
By all indications blockchain is turning into an all-encompassing technology across various sectors of society. Once we take the argument serious that blockchain has the potential to “change the scope of intermediation” a core challenge is to determine the level of involvement all involved parties have with the tech. Avoiding confusion, irritation or uncertainty is precious for blockchain solutions. Seen through the innovation lens there is a very thin line between surprising (in an irritating way) and astonishing (in a pleasing way). How can we guarantee that business partners, clients and users understand the benefit of a specific blockchain application?
A necessary starting point is to put business partners, clients and users in a position where they can estimate the overall value of the service. To facilitate a comfortable point of departure it is helpful to build on terminologies and a visual language people are already accustomed to. The aim is to put the advantage of the service or product itself at the center of attention. Blockchain applications are most likely to gain traction where they smoothly replace existing applications with solutions that enhance convenience, safety, cost efficiency, simplicity, speed, privacy, accuracy, transparency, and the like.
Think of using a blockchain-based car wallet in the context of urban parking. No need to prove your skills by driving up to the ticket machine, no need to wind down the window, no need to search for the ticket or the pay machine when you come back from a holiday or business trip. And you pay exact to the minute or second, because blockchain allows micro-payments. As the operator of the car park there is no real need to stress that the whole thing runs on a blockchain. That’s not the advantage as such. From a business model point of view what you want the whole world to know is: This is the car park without pile-ups at the entry, where customers only pay what they use, and payment is automatically taken care of. You can, of course, always take it to the next level and simply show what this place might feel like in practice.
Now apply this set-up to the day when cars move autonomously through the city. A context where it makes a lot of sense that interactions between automobiles and their surrounding infrastructure proceed without direct human interference. All of a sudden you are not only talking to satisfied motorists but a whole industry. In this scenario another interesting question pops up: How much technical detail do you communicate to business partners, clients and users?
How much detail is enough?
We are recently witnessing that corporations wish to explicate the technical sophistication of their services. Take for instance Apple’s release of Face ID. Hardly anyone has a clue how many sensors are in use for the fingerprint-based Touch ID. But as a semi-attentive reader of daily news you might know that the facial recognition software works by projecting 30,000 infrared dots on the user’s face. Apple obviously wants to make sure that we all get their message: Face ID is an advanced technology, unprecedented when it comes to intuitive, safe authentication. As a side note, by stressing the technical reliability with which the device analyzes facial expressions Apple also points to new business activities.
Let’s bring this tendency back in touch with blockchain. Emphasizing the advancement of a specific service or product is key (i.e. convenience, safety, cost efficiency, simplicity, speed, privacy, accuracy, transparency, etc.). All the same, when it comes to complex technical applications, you have to decide how much technical detail you wish to communicate. The articulation of technological functionalities varies from case to case and from audience to audience. If the technical features are essential to clarify and accentuate the improvement they should also be included in the message. If the blockchain-based car park one day turns into an everyday infrastructure for autonomous vehicles it might indeed be worthwhile to underline the more technical side of things to stand out in a crowd of competitors. The same goes if part of your overall strategy is to position yourself as a technologically innovative company. Similarly, if you consider blockchain to be a quantum leap in the context within which you are using it, it might be worthwhile to highlight that your service is blockchain-based and explain its technical set-up (more or less elaborate).
Cooperation and collaboration is the way forward
To sum up, let’s zoom back out to the broader blockchain picture. Ultimately, whether and how blockchain sinks into day-to-day applications that satisfy the growing social, political and economic expectations largely depends on two interrelated developments. First, the effectual interlocking of engineering, design and communicative competences. It is crucial to bring together diverse skills, knowledge and experiences from those who understand and develop complex technological systems with those who smoothly translate complexity into user-friendly applications as well as intelligible narratives. Second, strengthened cooperation across enterprises and industries is needed to research and develop blockchain implementations that deliver valuable solutions for users. Blockchain consortia not only share costs and resources more efficiently, they also enable more substantial applications in the long run. Along the way, to avoid heading down overly expensive or redundant roads, it is advisable to prototype. Instead of procrastinating within speculative terrain, go out and validate preliminary outcomes with relevant stakeholders, and improve where necessary.
