How to ready your business for the world of abundance?

In the next 10 years, all businesses will transform completely. But the change won’t be what you think.

I’m not talking about digitalization, augmented reality, artificial intelligence or robot factories. Granted, these are great steps but merely small chapters of a bigger story.

What I’m talking about is the underlying current that is really easy to miss in the ripple of everyday life.

“We are moving from the material world to the immaterial world.”

Physical products disappear or melt with services. Services become automated processes and mixed communities of living beings and computers. What we create in the future does not have a clearly defined, palpable body. Everything becomes ever-changing, undefinable amebas.

Homes become ecosystems of smart services, products shared stories, healthcare predictive and holistic, logistics autonomous and on-demand, banking shared, and traditional manual jobs disappear, giving rise to new vocations.

The tangible world is not going to evaporate. In the new world, the value of emotions, cognitive talent, computer learning, competence, information, self-actualization, generative thinking and everything intangible will become much more precious and overshadow what’s currently tangible.

In brief:

Material things become less valuable as the immaterial world becomes our focal point.

Unlearning the old ways

But wait… This gets even more difficult!

The material world is governed by scarcity. This makes it limited and often distressing. But as it is something we can touch, it is concrete, intelligible, predictable and ah, so familiar to us!

The immaterial world in turn is abundant. And for us, homo sapiens, both immateriality and abundance are un-nerving words. I confess, I too have difficulty explaining the true essence of these concepts to myself on certain busy afternoons.

This tsunami-like shift is difficult to grasp because the whole idea of abundance is inconceivable to many of us. Our whole existence has been a battle in the world of limited resources. And now, after millions of years of gathering experience in the material world, suddenly we are at a watershed moment expected to to embrace the abundance. Our stone-age minds are really poorly equipped to handle all this immateriality and galore.

3 simple rules

To help myself capitalize on this change, I have created 3 simple rules. I try to follow them every time I’m crafting a strategy or designing a new service.

1. Never create anything that stays still

(In business jargon: Encourage a perpetual flow of everything)

Static elements will be copied or surpassed by competition in nanoseconds. Try to see everything as elastic flows that can be gently bent and combined to create new flows.

So don’t create a new power drill, but foster a user community around one. Don’t create an online fashion store, but conceive a shared protocol for body measurement profiles.

Competitive edge comes from four capabilities:
– Ability to create and nourish unique flows
– Ability to see asymmetric and emergent flows where no-one else sees them.
– Ability to direct and melt flows.
– Ability to create tangible effects out of intangible flows.

A static object is acceptable only if it A. emits, B. guides, or C. captures a significant immaterial flow. For example, an object that people really love, or a sensor that creates unique data.

2. Don’t be a control freak!

(In business jargon: Promote shared ownership and transparency)

Your chances of creating and nourishing unique flows increase greatly if you follow these steps:
– Share ownership with others, and let them pour their creativity to co-create shared value.
– Be honest and transparent about your motives. Fake incentives and hidden agenda will kill any flows even before they emerge.
– Own only really essential touch points where material converts to immaterial and vice versa.

My friend David Nordfors has a brilliant way of wording this:
“Innovators need to answer only 2 questions to be winners:
1) How will my story become their story?
2) How does it remain mine once it’s theirs?”

3. Fuck the money!

(In business jargon: Creation of value over profit)

Money is a metric for scarcity and it is intended for measuring material value. But most of the true value of your services is immaterial. If you focus on money, it will tie you down, and you will miss many opportunities to create immaterial value. If you fail to generate things like emotions, knowledge, or a sense of belonging, you will probably not make any money either.

Balancing between the material and immaterial creates an intriguing dilemma: focus too much on immaterial and fail to generate profit. Or focus too much on material and fail to create any value.

To sum it up:

We are taking an evolutionary step. Nothing less. It is not about technology. It is not about business. It is not about AI or robots. It is a fundamental shift in how we live our lives and who we are as a species.

To succeed in business in the new paradigm we have to unlearn our old ways. We need to start seeing the world as flows. Then we can learn to melt these flows in unison with other people and machines. And when we get really good at it, we can ditch the old material-metric-driven models and focus on the creation of true value.