The Virtual-First Age Is Here to Stay

The 3 essential software elements for flexible distance business

Published in

Hi-flier

16 min readApr 7, 2020

As my family gathered around a multi-way WhatsApp video call — initiated by my 20-year old daughter in Maastricht, The Netherlands, with my parents in Germany, brother in Philadelphia, and me in Silicon Valley — it seemed the coronavirus had brought us closer together. We compared our situations around the world: My son’s school closing here, my daughter’s university closing there, the grandparents canceling upcoming trips (they like to travel all the time). It turns out we were all OK and adjusting, and we agreed to do another video conference in 3 days. As long as we had electricity and connectivity, keeping in touch was easy, cost nothing (and was perhaps even encrypted, not sure). We felt stronger!

We humans are fortunate compared to all other species in how fast we are able to adapt to just about anything — and then we have language and science on top of that. But to adapt it seems we need to be thoroughly pushed; as many have noted a pandemic does that, the much more serious climate emergency not so much. The good thing is, once pushed, our changed behavior can become part of our habit and knowledge and persist over time. The tuberculosis pandemic stopped the formerly common practice of spitting in public, and the AIDS epidemic led to safer sex.

Can this global pandemic (as of writing about half of the global population is in lock-down) push us to a better place overall? Here the answer is an emphatic yes, in how we can together become more flexible in moving between in-person and distance business — to deal with health, environmental and all kinds of crises that may be around the corner. There are three elements of human-attuned software that have great potential to help us achieve that new flexibility, and that can even set us free to be more successful in business overall:

CONTEXT — Here’s what’s going on
LOCATION — We’re here and able to act
DIRECTION — This is where we’re going

Successfully delivering these three software abilities will help us usher in the post in-person age or economy, making distance business the paradigm, and in-person the exception.

We get it this time

Crises are pivotal times, where we reach tipping points in which the ‘usual’ balance is knocked to a permanently different state. For example, many stock exchanges with all their new technology still retain trading floors with actual people, bartering not much differently to those on bazaars thousands of years ago. But it’s a small step to go fully digital and there are strong examples in telemedicine and telelearning.

It’s imperative to adjust our expectations and behaviors away from the sense that business preferably takes place in person, and that with all digital transformation advances in the last decades, now is the time when our expectations tip to expecting any kind of business (not just consumer e-commerce), even the complex or negotiation kind, to be interacted online, with zero in-person anchoring necessary.

And when we look around the world and the strong response that is building to the pandemic, we see that we indeed are able to adapt in this way. Over just a number of weeks, here are 3 anecdotal pieces of evidence:

Travel is down 90% or more in many regions, with many connections cut completely
Microsoft says its Teams business chat app has seen a 500 percent increase in usage in China amid the coronavirus outbreak. Its user numbers have increased since November 2019 from 20 to 44M. Zoom has seen its active mobile users in March be 151% higher than the year before, with daily U.S. mobile user volumes reaching a record 4.84 million
Recent stock market moves seem to have strongly benefited providers of online learning, collaboration or trading platforms

This pandemic will wane eventually, and we may still go back to where we were before. But the global nature, the sudden economic standstill, and weeks of shelter-in-place make it much more likely that the new normal will be different, that the center of gravity has changed for good.

Accelerating change that was already underway

The current pandemic has accentuated and accelerated current trends. Many people working in IT are now reflecting on up to 20 years of online conferencing experience, lessons learned around online etiquette. We’ve had webinars and even online conferences for a long time — but not of course for the whole working population. Nevertheless, working flexibly, coming together for gigs, providing services remotely through global teams has been going on for many years. The time of working from home has continued to increase, mostly though as a mix of in-person and online. The number of those that go so far as identifying as working remotely grew from 3% in 2000 to 5% in 2017 (USA Census Bureau American Community Survey, 2000–2017).

Interactive online gaming is enjoyed by 2.4B people around the world (in 2018, a 6% increase y-o-y; Newzoo Global Games Market Reports, 2016–2018)! This is perhaps a quarter of the world’s population playing fast-moving multi-player multi-level action games in shared environments with collective missions — perhaps using their brains and skills to the same or even higher effect than when we conduct and transact business traditionally. The coming generation certainly seems to be at ease and even see benefits in their interactive games (Fortnite online survey of USA teens October 2018):

50% = Learn Teamwork Skills
44% = Make a Friend Online
40% = Improve Communication Skills
39% = Bond with Siblings

Finally, we should also consider our attempts to limit CO2 emissions, to replace travel with online experiences. When we go outside now, we happily breathe in the fresh air — much fresher than normal, in many regions down to 25% of normal particle pollution. We enjoy the empty streets, the reduced noise. Perhaps we even enjoy nature and animals around us seemingly living it up a bit while humans take a mandatory break. The point is, here we are with a dwindling carbon budget and not being able to respond in any decisive way, and the pandemic surpasses the wildest dreams of any of us to listen to overwhelming science and respond. We have been trying to shift from atoms to bytes to sustain life on earth, now we know we can.

Push comes to shove

We see now: business as usual is over. We’ve been able to go online, but we’ve hesitated to let go of meeting and pursuing business as we always have — in-person. We’ve made progress but could not bring ourselves to going all the way. Now distance business is upon us. Over the course of weeks, we have seen huge workforces go online — quite successfully at least for certain durations and many functions. For the next generation workers, distance learning has replaced classroom instruction in a matter of weeks, and our kids are now using video-conferencing tools from the get-go.

The next years will see us organizing very differently, and we don’t want to be caught off guard again. This raises some big questions, and the answers will differ for different cultures and areas of business. In significant ways we are forced to reconsider how we ‘come together’, how we manage distance. What is a quality education, and how much absolutely needs to be in-person? What is the limit to a doctor coming up with an online diagnosis? And for our focus here: How much does a business relationship, execution and success depend on being in-person, perhaps even having a drink together, or simply building transactional success with each other? Of course, we can’t just say that trust or social interaction or emotions aren’t important anymore.

Today’s business tools tend not to be human-centric, so establishing a joint context is exhausting, time-consuming, and incomplete. This brings us to the first essential software element for distance business.

1. The business software needs to provide a context that allows to flexibly move between distance and in-person interaction.

From now on, we want the ability to switch flexibly between in-person and distance-interaction, without hiccups, as needed. We want to be able to decide depending on business priority how much CO2 emissions can be saved, and how much personal direct exposure to a health or other risk is appropriate. In view of the constant information overflow, we also want the ability to limit our exposure to online, the barrage of text and notifications, advertising, the whole world connected.

To achieve this new freedom, the software cannot just be a siloed online tool. It needs to be able to represent business context across ‘worlds’ to help us accomplish this, keeping connection and logic from beginning to end. In other words, it needs to be human- or business-centric.

This is much more than having a mobile option. It is much more holistic than chat here, documents there, online conference over there, and now business people please glue together and be the stream — it is software that allows to represent that stream or flow itself, and the business actors can tap in and out as they desire. It means representing reality around our joint problem solving, having the resources come to us when we need them. As a huge aside, we get to unload all of the holding of context that is now on us, where our memories limit the number of business streams we can possibly remember or keep track of in parallel.

Questions that would be answered:

What is our common goal or objective, our mission?
What are the main steps or milestones on our joint journey?
What are the terms of engagement?
What is the agreed timeframe?
How much do we trust each other?

New software abilities

Having been part of the software industry for over 20 years, it still seems to me we have a large part of the potential open to us in making software be there for us, not the other way around. Getting closer to a truly human experience, being business centric in allowing us to focus on engaging and winning with each other. Having it be our agenda, our way of relating — where at the end we truly feel closer and stronger together.

Beyond the above first element of flexible business context, the two other essential software elements also derive from how we human beings experience and interact with each other generally: providing a sense of location and a sense of direction.

2. The business software needs to provide a sense of location that can focus action.

We can talk and text and email a lot. In contrast, progress or achieving key milestones usually involves coming together in an unambiguous context to record critical actions together. When looking at business (as said above in difference to work, which is mostly well defined and can be an individual or a set team, and there are many offerings of workspaces) this really is still left for people to organize on the fly themselves: for this milestone, who is involved, in what role, who is accountable and responsible (similar to the RACI roles), what are the critical documents or items to be shared. So reluctantly, business professionals are the experts in creating this purposeful sense of location over and over again, for each milestone and for each business interaction. Physically it can be having all the paper documents ready, online perhaps in cloud storage in one place or sharing through an online conference. IDC (November 2018 Future of Work Survey) has calculated that between 30–50% of time is usually expended for this creation of an actionable meaning, having all the right documents, knowing about the status, for creating a sufficient sense of location for joint success.

What can a similar human experience look like, with a location that holds a story together? We’re very familiar of course with representing stories in theater, with defined roles, joint action through scenes and whole stories that have been stylized and produced as plays for the longest time (here from a Shakespeare play; he is also the one to note “All the world’s a stage” in one of his plays):

Indeed, it’s been able to represent just about all kinds of human stories this way over thousands of years. Today we would first think of such a location as in-person, perhaps something like this:

Is business context different, e.g. to negotiate a deal? It does seem appropriate when the need is to see human protagonists come together as business unfolds, when it’s about capturing their joint struggle to find a solution and come to a happy ending. The people and their roles, the milestones or scenes of their joint journey come first, as they need the clarity of meaning of what is exchanged to succeed. A human and business centric software location then will be able to create the sense of such a location in a similar way. And it will be able to represent and progress scene-by-scene, showing how the business is unfolding step by step. And it will have the resources (daggers, documents, …) coming to the people as they need them, not the other way around as is currently mostly the case.

In enterprise environments we got close to these cross-functional apps that could represent business objective and scenarios, and flexibly pull in services as part of service-oriented architectures (SOA) in the early 2000s. The sense of ‘mash-ups’ remained after that. Yet to support flexible business interactions, to have a concentrated environment as an inclusive and simple way to get to joint action and success, there really is nothing like that today.

Questions that would be answered:

Who is relevant for this milestone, in what role or contributing how, who is accountable and responsible, or who is watching and advising
All instructions are available
All relevant business items are available. No more, no less
All communication relevant to this milestone is plain to see, no looking through feeds necessary and finding the right scene. Again, no more, no less
Does this location have the integrity to support our sensitive and high-value interests

If these things were known, if all of the business semantics were known, it would no longer be a question of being in person or not, that would become optional. And with the location and all its information being available across time (like time-shift for TV), it would completely upend the current practice of needing regular status meetings — how cool is that?!

3. Business software needs to provide a sense of direction that replicates human drive.

Plays have their own tragic or comic drives, in business there is always someone who has to fill in to be pushing the story along. Within enterprises there have been many different kinds of workflow technology. Usually they got to represent the ‘machine’, degrading the people involved to specialized workers feeding it, not much different to the original machines of the 19th century. As a result, adoption was mostly non-existent. For something as dynamic as business, which represents more an artform of people and interests coming together, with expectations of becoming ever more agile in serving ever more nuanced or personalized services and products, these technologies could never work.

So even more than within a company, in business it has always been up to specific people to design interactions or transactions like how a deal would play out, and then to fill in and with much energy and motivational skills to move them forward from step to step. As in the blue arrow below, a big part of success is winning over inertia:

So many in business are somewhat specialized to have this energy. People like paralegals, sales ops, business developers, partner managers, mortgage or real estate brokers, people who spend much of their time ensuring coordination and the right resources to get to completion — to then start over for the next transaction.

Because what tools do they have currently? Email or text? If it’s really about achieving completion at all like in sales, or ensuring an asset or event is delivered on time, how much effort goes into ‘pushing rope’ or ‘herding cats’? For many business people this will probably be much closer to 90% than the 30–50% quoted of IDC. Being a motivation hero or a logistics lion in the face of much inertia is a big part of the job description, even if it is rarely called out explicitly.

Such business flow software would incentivize the actions in the scenes, it would tie the scenes together to always point to obvious completion. The software would be elastic, to be both flexible and be able to push everyone in moving forward. It would have the business semantics that would allow to form and adapt the business as it ‘plays’ out. Questions that would be answered:

When did we start on this, when do we need to be done?
Who are we waiting for? Are we behind or ahead of time?
How does this compare to last time, or how others are conducting business?
If I’m good at orchestrating business towards a difficult objective, how can I show that to my prospective customers?
If the artform is in designing this stream or flow for an interaction, how can I tweak it and repeat it?
If I don’t need to keep status in my head anymore, how many more business plays can I conduct concurrently?

Business designers and drivers (=entrepreneurs!), those that are able to intuit the best how to have people come together across the network, should be the superstars today, as we move from corporations to networks to be able to go from idea to action, from action to scale faster.

The world and business are highly dynamic, with ever new technologies and opportunities and challenges — and people — all around just waiting for the creative synthesis to come together for something great. What if we empowered these entrepreneurs beyond email or speech with business semantics that can be manipulated in an elastic business flow environment? And then they have all the great automation and analytics and performance of software at their disposal, and can focus on their real business objectives?

The future with flexible distance business

Often the in-person paradigm forces us to go to great lengths to travel or even move our home for our jobs. But why should you pick up your life and quit your community to be successful in business, if you can interact with business partners like you normally would with a similar experience over the Internet.

The time has come to usher in the post in-person age or economy. Distance business should be the paradigm, and in-person should be the exception. Over the next 6 to 18 months we will have the right focus to make real progress. We already have a lot of digital tools at our disposal, we’ve argued here we can still do much better:

To have the ability to establish and keep business context together, independent of being apart or in person
That within such context software can provide enough sense of location and clarity to be fully actionable for business success
That within such context software can enable a strong sense of direction to drive coordinated success across ephemeral business networks

In important respects it is completing the work we have started along many disparate tracks of digital transformation, by adding a clear business purpose, making the technology truly business-centric, starting with the human experience. Then we can begin to reap the benefits of flexible distance business, some we have been looking to achieve for a long time:

Much more agile, more personalized and less expensive services, with an emphasis on human intelligence and creativity
A much higher level of innovation as we get to combine more easily across diverse and global people
Scale and high-quality business opportunities for millions of amazing people, many of whom want to do more to improve their lives and those of others
Dramatically increasing access for disabled people, and leveling the playing field for those that otherwise may not have been able to partake in globally available opportunities because e.g. air travel was prohibitively expensive
Massively reducing CO2 emissions and congestion

We become much more flexible overall. For personal needs of family or living, to respond to environmental or health crises, or whatever else may be on the horizon.

Tim Bussiek PhD, CEO of Hi-flier, develops digital products for human experiences. Starting in academia, he spent 20 years with leading software companies such as SAP before starting Hi-flier, a simple, structured environment that helps entrepreneurial professionals make their everyday business fly.