Why the Best is Yet to Come
It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by technological progress, but the real work — solving problems, building businesses — still has to be done.
The Oxford Nanopore MinION is a £1,000 DNA Sequencer the size of a Mars Bar. In 2015 a scientist flew to West Africa with three MinIONs in his luggage, and was able to sequence the Ebola virus in 48 hours; a task that would previously have required a lab full of equipment. In 2016 it was tested in zero gravity on board the International Space Station.
Technological advances like the MinION can give a sense of vertigo. The floor and roof drop away, and possibilities suddenly can seem endless.
In 2018 it’s easy to feel like any idea that didn’t use a handheld DNA sequencer, perhaps in conjunction with Blockchain, and Machine Learning and Augmented Reality goggles, would hardly be worth considering.
But that’s wrong.
People working in technology imagine that it is a force of nature. But the important thing isn’t the technological breakthrough, but the ecosystem it creates, the need it meets, the societal change it makes possible.
In 2018 you can make good decisions, create radical products and change the world, without obsessing over the bleeding edge.
What’s important is understanding customers, finding real problems and bringing imagination and hard work to bear on solving those problems.
Starting with technology and building back is almost impossible because, as 1970s futurologist Roy Amara said, ‘We tend to overestimate the impact of a new technology in the short run, but we underestimate it in the long run.’
Gene sequencing is itself a good example of Roy’s law. When Bill Clinton and Tony Blair jointly announced the first human gene sequence in 2000, their optimism (‘Our children’s children will know the term cancer only as a constellation of stars,’ said Clinton) seemed far-fetched. Ten years later it seemed absurd. Almost 20 years later, with scientists sequencing Ebola cures on their laptops, it’s starting to sound reasonable again.
The GPS navigation system has undoubtedly changed the world, but it took decades. The first GPS satellites were launched in 1974, and the constellation of 30+ satellites still wasn’t complete during the first Gulf War in 1990 — constant funding challenges and the Space Shuttle crash slowed it down.
By the millennium, the constellation was fully in place, signals were unlocked for civilian use and receivers were miniaturised. In 2004 TomTom built a vast business, selling tens of millions of sat-nav units for drivers.
At the time, TomTom felt like the logical conclusion — the end state of satellite navigation. Getting into location services in 2005 would seem foolhardy. In reality, it was just the start.
GPS chips were added to iPhones in 2008, and a year later Uber was born. Looking at the first backpack-sized GPS units in 1974, you might have imagined TomTom (now worth $2bn). You could never have imagined Uber (now worth $72bn).
Fluxx often helps companies respond to these kind of technology-led opportunities. What we see, over and over again is that people working in technology imagine that it is a force of nature, improving and ‘disrupting’ everywhere it goes.
But the important thing isn’t the technological breakthrough, but the ecosystem it creates, the need it meets, the societal change it makes possible.
It’s happened before, and will happen again.
The invention of the electric motor didn’t immediately change manufacturing. Factories were designed around steam engines, with power distributed by belts and gears. Electric motors (and the power stations they required) started to appear in 1881, but even 30 years later in 1910, many new factories were built using steam power.
Why? Economist Tim Harford explains: ‘To take advantage of electricity, factory owners had to think in a very different way. They could, of course, use an electric motor in the same way as they used steam engines. It would slot right into their old systems. But electricity meant you could organise factories differently.
‘Old factories were dark and dense, packed around the shafts. New [electrified] factories could spread out, with natural light and air. Factories could be cleaner and safer — and more efficient, because machines needed to run only when they were being used. But you couldn’t get these results simply by ripping out the steam engine and replacing it with an electric motor. You needed to change everything: the architecture and the production process… the way workers were recruited, trained and paid. Factory owners hesitated, for understandable reasons.’
Technology happens, but change takes longer, with progress a long way behind.
The people who find it hardest to change can be the people with the most power in the old world. As economist Chad Syverson explains: ‘Incumbents are designed around the current ways of doing things and so proficient at them that they are blind to or unable to absorb the new approaches and get trapped in the status quo — they suffer the “curse of knowledge”.’
It seems we’re reliving history at the moment, and the productivity gains of the digital revolution remain mostly in the future.
That feels counter-intuitive when every big company has been thinking about digital for at least a decade, and Apple and Facebook are vast companies, but it’s undoubtedly true.
In his wonderful (and short) essay ‘You Are Not Late’, Kevin Kelly imagines the first sixty years of the Internet, from the first .com domain name in 1985 to 2045. We’re bang in the middle:
“In terms of the Internet, nothing has happened yet. The Internet is still at the beginning of its beginning. If we could climb into a time machine and journey 30 years into the future, and from that vantage look back to today, we’d realise that most of the greatest products running the lives of citizens in 2044 were not invented until after 2014.
“People in the future will look at their holodecks, and wearable virtual reality contact lenses, and downloadable avatars, and AI interfaces, and say, oh, you didn’t really have the Internet (or whatever they’ll call it) back then. And they’d be right. Because from our perspective now, the greatest online things of the first half of this century are all before us. All these miraculous inventions are waiting for that crazy, no-one-told- me-it-was-impossible visionary to start grabbing the low-hanging fruit.” Sometime around 2019, perhaps?
The people who find it hardest to change can be the people with the most power in the old world.
At Fluxx, we’re often invited in to help understand how a revolutionary tech might help a business, but — as with electricity — the bigger victories come from re-inventing the way a process works.
For RSA we helped introduce simple but powerful tech to enable customers to send photos of claims rather than try to explain in words and drawings, but far bigger than that together we inverted the claims process to be a help process.
Rather than a combative stance to limit claims and payouts we started from a perspective of what could we do to help? The results were remarkable, including an NPS score moving from -12 to +97.
We’ve helped Severn Trent Water use that Uber stack of location+ communication+ payments to reduce water leaks. We’re helping an engineering company re-fashion their business model in the face of automation. We’re using consumer-grade 3D scanners to improve aircraft maintenance schedules and building digital tools can help pensioners get the most from their pension pots. It may be that the technology involved is the telling difference in each case, but it’s probably just a catalyst for thinking bigger about re-inventing the whole process and organisation that surrounds it.
If you’d like to see ways we’ve helped companies and could help yours, take a look at our site: Fluxx.uk.com, subscribe to our newsletter and/or read the free download of our new book The Plan Sucks.
You might also enjoy: 31 lessons from startups doing it better than you, or How Fluxx uses jugaad innovation Every Day.
Tom Whitwell is a Senior Consultant at Fluxx, a company that uses experiments to understand customers, helping clients to build better products. We work with organisations such as Condé Nast International, Energy Systems Catapult, National Grid, BEIS and Severn Trent Water.
