The Future Of Business Is Society 5.0 When Everything Is Down To Human Connectedness, Emotions, Experiences, Values, People, Data, Technology, …and You …
Society 5.0 a new era, a new paradigm for individuals and business
As we are inevitably drawn towards the Society 5.0 era – the next generation of business, team, and individual performance management is here. New rules and paradigms for defining, measuring and capturing business success are obsoleting the present dominant yet increasingly weakening values and themes that defined winning over the last century and half.
On the ground living day to day it’s hard to see the wood for the trees. How then can we as individuals think about this big shift to give us a new understanding within which to shape and act out our choices – that will likely put us on the right side of history.
What does Society 5.0 mean for me now – and what can I do?
Thought experiment: If Your Business Where A High Tech Sport and You Were A Player Within It…
Imagine you, your business and your competition. In a highly competitive international league playing for the championship. Imagine you are a star player and your raving fans and supporters who know everything and follow you and your team everywhere. They connect with you, your and your teams brand, at an unprecedented emotional level and are so loyal they will go to any lengths to see you and your team come out ahead.
Your fans watch and opine on your every move. Driven by emotion and connection more than logic alone. They will debate your position, they will cry and celebrate with you every step of the way. They are brutal because they love you and care. They feel your hurt and joy. It’s pure emotion and experiential escapism. Full 100 % bi-directional enduring engagement and commitment through thick and thin.
They govern your raison d’être. As consumers of your brand through their loyalty and commitment they in turn enable you to thrive and prosper symbiotically with your shared growing success as an individual and the team in which you play. They are collectively your, your teams, and your sports license to operate.
Winning is a global team sport down to the choices you make. Now imagine what it takes for a modern leading sportsman and winning team and growing sport to get and remain ahead, and your role and contribution within that as a star player. The whole ecosystem from the world to the sport to the fans to the league, to competing teams, to supporting cast and teams, your team and you have an increasing interdependent relationship. Every actor has a role. Every individual a vote and say.
It’s a growing winners take all business. Modern team sports are already big brands and big big business. They are a composite of talent team and technology across the entire eco-system. The sports compete with sports, teams with teams, individuals with individuals for time and attention and reward. They have huge investments across these dimensions and superior supporting casts of actors infrastructure and winning services providers to lock in and continuously grow their positions in a constant competitive battle for mastery they are rewarded with disproportionate gains.
Leaders have disproportionately more to invest in winning more. Their ability to attract talent, leverage advanced data to define winning strategies, executed through smart moves at the talent and team level augmented by technology engaged to give both you as a player and them as a team the edge to continuously win.
Your connected eco-system and machines underpin your success. Imagine how a targeted growing fan base spending more money on richer experiences and thrills enables you to increasingly outspend your competition across talent, team and technology dimensions – widening the gap at an accelerating pace. A few top-tier players and an increasingly long tail of middle league players in a shrinking pool of supporters means over time the few winners who can keep up investment in technology and grow attract and retain top talent and deploy it best grow at others expense in a winner take all scenario.
Driving a new people data technology paradigm. Every sport increasingly involves the leveraged use of data and technology to secure success. The “closed-loop” system of the rules of sport means competitive sports are also operating in the world of increased marginal gains. Where deep insights and smart moves can make the “little-big” difference that keeps you ahead of the pack. Innovations work across operations, strategy, and tactics during and after play.
In a world of diminishing returns that teaches people to expect exciting constant change. Imagine now in the context of your existing business where marginal gains and new innovations are playing an increasing role in success but are lacking a loyal committed and increasingly diminished fan base. Your consumers tire of the same old game and old values and are drawn toward the distinguished individualised exciting and new. Where they seek out the new emotional connection engagement and thrill of an exciting new sport.
You need a new sport game and pitch fitting for the challenge. Imagine now Society 5.0 as a new game and pitch on which to play where the new fans are flocking towards. You can as yet help define the game, set the rules, and attract the fans that will give you license to operate. If you don’t somebody else will.
Society 5.0 is your opportunity to thrive and prosper. Business in Society 5.0 will leverage People Data and Technology in exciting new ways that address societal level challenges and opportunities that benefit the many not just the few. Individuals and enterprises that find this new path and figure out how to appeal to both society and the individual rather than just the corporate self interest will prosper more greatly than ever before.
Society 5.0 is the new game and pitch on which you can play that will bring the sport of business much closer to where consumers and individuals are needing it to be.
As an individual the choices you make now will determine the trajectory and outcome you are headed towards. There has never been such an exciting time in our living generations as exists today, and never before a more important set of choices to make on which future to build toward.
The choice is definitive and yours and ours to make. As individuals through our collective support and decisions we have the power to choose which enterprises represent and service us in Society 5.0. As business people we have a duty to ensure we are favored amongst the best to lead the change.
See below for current examples of the patterns and undercurrents that are defining the drivers for transition to Society 5.0 values and capabilities.
Sport As Business – Diminishing Returns, Marginal Gains
I just read an article about the Tour de France that starts to sound very much like Formulae 1 where the win loss spread over some 90 minutes of racing and 300km is decided in a few thousandths of a second.
With Tour de France margins for the winner of a stage is often down to less than a hundredth of a second (a tyre width), and with the overall winning divide being under two minutes across the entire 3,351 kilometres, every marginal gain the teams can eek out is absolutely essential to win.
rience
Exponential technological advancement applied to business using the same dynamics of advanced R&D, rapid closed loop learning of applied technology, empowering capable teams, and augmenting talented people is assuring the same impact and consequences is trending for business.
Technology, data, talent organised and orchestrated are converging to drive step change capabilities to amplify and capture increasingly tighter marginal gains.
Appeal To Society As Well
The big reward for winning, reinvested in capability, societal gains, and shareholder reward, assures new compounding success – attracting talent and fan acclaim. The losers with less to invest in an increasingly sophisticated game – spiral down the long tail to eventual oblivion.
Business is people. People are starting to care and have a voice. With the system of trade shifting from constraints to abundance, from national to locally global, consumers and employees have real choice and a powerful economic vote.
With the shift to tech driven automation of tasks and tech augmentation of humans in both business and society, businesses will look like and need to operate much more like a high performance tech talent data driven sport. They will need to grow, attract and apply scarce talent, and loyal customers will reward them for their success in bringing great emotional experiences.
Build deep emotional connections
In the experience economy when businesses need to connect more emotionally to their customers, and their employees and partners, and deliver deep meaningful experiences to the talent that executes the experience and the fans that absorb it, as with sports ,the raving fans emotionally connected to the outcome reward the sustained application of talent and results.
This may sound far off, but for digital natives like Amazon it’s already a fact they appreciate – just announcing they will sped $700m retooling all their staff to thrive in this new world.
As with sport, business and societal success comes increasingly from a complex interplay of specialised talented collaboration, functioning as a team, with a spirit of endeavour, a talent for creativity, a penchant for cooperation, and grit for endurance and persistence.
Data is king, the fuel of society 5.0, learned resiliance is the key for people
Aided by data. Driven by technology. Powered by automation and augmentation. Applied in a timely way at the fulcrum of events to inform critical decisions executed with rigour and consistency under intense pressure at crucial leverage moments thousands and thousands of times, that in aggregate over time define the outcome and winners.
The world of leveraged marginal gains where expensive applied innovation enables a step change in doing more with less.
Beside data, beyond trained honed and leveraged expertise, all things being equal – the same machines, the same rules, the same operating conditions – the only other thing remaining as the crucial point of differentiation in sports, is mental resilience. Mental conditioning is now more crucial than physical conditioning, which along with machine and team conditioning in the world of marginal gains, are reduced to table-stakes.
What qualities enable new leadership to happen?
- Brand permission and license to operate from a raving fan base
- An authentic overarching people and emotion centric purpose and mission beyond the traditional boundaries of self-interest and profit.
- Growing, attracting, retaining talent. Applied consistency of talented trained people functioning in high performance teams with focussed execution.
- All waste eliminated and talent applied where machines can’t reach
- Highly creative within bounds problem solving and innovation rapidly applied to highest points of value and differentiation
- Amplified by technology automation and augmentation, and guided by data and learning in closed loop iterations on open ended systems
- Exploitation of marginal gains to capture the prize to enable reinvestment for sustained growing leadership.
- A focus on honing training simulating mental physical conditions of people with robust machines and essential supporting networks.
- An emergent beyond people and enterprise collaborative model into an eco system or better said value-net that underpins and sustains this new way of working.
- A license to operate in Society 5.0 granted by the community you serve, earned by the values you choose
With both Industry 4.0 and society 5.0 – Super Smart age upon us, the opportunity is upon us for everyone to choose.
We are already in the midst of this – with people being the pure point of differentiation augmented with teams data and technology, collaborating in inter enterprise value nets to drive people organisation and societal humanity level gains, elected by us as consumers.
The models of education, organisation, leadership, management, government, currency, value and measure of success at the individual enterprise and society level will in the next 10 years look nothing like it does today.
The question is – where will you be in 10 years from today, what will your work and business look like, and what will your contribution be?
The even more important question is – what actions are you taking today to secure your relevance and value in this new emergent society?
