I’m sorry but you’ve got abundance all wrong
The age of abundance is coming. But the problem is that abundance in the digital age is going to be something completely different than we think.
A long line of wise people from business game-changers like Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler to thinkers like Robert C. Wolcott and scientists like Michio Kaku declare that the age of abundance will soon be upon us. And I agree with them all.
Transformation from scarcity to abundance will have more profound repercussions to our way of life than we can now imagine. And it is going to happen sooner than we expect. So let’s quickly prepare ourselves for the future!
To do that, we need only adjust something tiny, but crucial, in our thinking.
And this simple thing is our perception of abundance itself.
The biggest misconception about abundance is that we think of it as simply the opposite of scarcity. But digitalization is about to create a completely new kind of abundance.
“Digital abundance is not the opposite of scarcity.”
If I were to ask you to explain abundance in one sentence, I bet your answer would be something like this:
“Having enough or even too much of something”
The abundance we are now facing is not about eating pork chops every day, having several cars in the driveway or living like Roman emperors. It will not be about having more things. It will be about having less.
In the future you will not own a car. You are not even allowed to drive one any longer. And you might not even know where you are going. You just step outside and a vehicle is waiting for you. And it knows where you need to be.
You probably will not even know who pays for the ride. It might be part of your Amazon Prime account or bundled into your company’s insurance package.
What is this digital abundance and why will we have fewer things?
The answer is very simple:
The fastest way for any single element to become abundant is to become “lighter” by shedding its material body. By becoming intangible an element has a better chance of scaling exponentially and becoming abundant.
Let’s look at the history of storytelling, for example. From the Stone Age, when each story required one person to tell it, through papyrus, paper and the printing press to telegraph, radio, television and internet, we have come to a point where a single story can reach millions of people with very little effort. And that’s not the end of it. We are entering a phase where devices and digital services are autonomously weaving stories around us.
Each cycle of innovation has made storytelling less limited by physical constraints. And as stories become more immaterial they become more abundant.
As we look around we can see similar events taking place all around us.
Giant leaps in the development of A.I., for example, will free up thinking from our biological bodies and disseminate it everywhere.
Blockchain will transform banking as it does not need any one assigned entity to approve transactions. Trust (or mistrust) is everywhere and nowhere in particular at the same time.
“What is the easiest way for any element to reach for abundance? Having as tiny a tangible mass as possible.”
And that means we will have fewer things instead of more.
Echoing Stewart Brand’s iconic phrase: “Information wants to be free”, I claim digitalization opened up a race for ALL elements towards freedom. So, to expand on Brand’s remark, I say “Every element wants to be abundant”.
Our view of scarcity and abundance is, for lack of a better word, naïve and linear. We will not have more. We will have less.
More security but fewer police officers.
More nutrition but fewer farms.
More content but less paid media.
More industrial components but less transportation.
More productivity but fewer jobs.
We are children of scarcity with very limited experience of abundance. Just as Stone Age man could never imagine how storytelling would change, we have no idea which of the elements we consider scarce today could become abundant tomorrow and just what the ramifications are.
This much is certain: Digitalization has opened new possibilities for many elements to escape their tangible form. And this makes them very likely to become abundant.
Business perspective
Our world will not become abundant overnight. But changes may come in incremental bursts that catch businesses off guard. Remember how information and entertainment became abundant the second they were freed from their confined physical forms?
Your business might not abandon the world of scarcity today, but it will certainly be affected by other businesses making the transition. We are seeing a surge of business models born to embrace the abundance. Freemium strategy, sharing economy and servitization, among many others, are consequences, but also amplifiers, of digital abundance. And we can feel the shockwaves across the business spectrum.
3 ways businesses can approach digital abundance
3 Strategic angles to consider:
- Take the big leap and replace your material offering with a more immaterial one.
To follow: Every new digital service is disrupting someone’s material business by meeting the same needs with a more immaterial solution. - Copy best practices of a more immaterial service.
To follow: The energy sector as a whole is changing rapidly. Advances in solar and wind energy technology is distributing production to ever smaller units and soon noone will have definitive control over the sector. Energy is about to become a rapidly evolving P2P and M2M business. - Combine your material offering with digital services.
To follow: Every tangible product is already sold or promoted online. But what other platforms or ecosystems could they connect with?
Recap:
Our future will be more abundant but we will have fewer things. And this is due to the simple fact that as all products and services strive for abundance they strip themselves from every material aspects that might slow them down. For a business this offers a unique opportunity to reinvent itself.
