It can be done. Always.

This text, dear reader, requires a moderate dose of unconventional thinking and imagination.

(Not really but it has been our experience that the limbic system should be prompted whenever it will be exposed to material that does not try to re-state the obvious.)

We at Fourkind are very proud of our approach. Our mindset allows us to stay clear from moral hazard, non-productive hierarchy and those mental obstacles, which are born in these statements: “Our business does not actually work like that”.

Well, raise your hand if there is nothing at your current company that could be done better.

We thought so.

If your business is run more or less the same way it was run 15 years ago, let alone 50 years ago, there needs to be a discussion. Better questions deserve better answers.

The real questions are: have we ever really thought about how business should be conducted in the 2020s? Do we really know how well our businesses currently work? Most importantly, what do we base these beliefs on?

We like to acid test our thinking. You should too. You can start by asking yourself is there such a business as hotel business, or can the temporary accommodation value stream be fulfilled more intelligently? If you were given 50 black Audis today, would you go into taxi business? If you had to create a new payment and currency ecosystem, would you start printing faces of dead people on paper? Are we convinced that paying for a coffee requires human interaction and queuing up at the counter?

Better yet, what happens when all consumers and businesses are assisted by very advanced artificial intelligence when they are in dialogue with one another, whether it be business or pleasure? What is the value generation mechanism in using paper in contracts, receipts and action-providing documents?

It is nothing short of a scandal unless real questions, like the few above, are seeking answers in specific business contexts. To be clear, you can identify a real question by the volume of resistance it generates.

“That is unrealistic.”

“That is a nice vision but too difficult to tackle now.”

“Our business is not there yet.” (The ones that are the most scared use this one)

Fine. What shall we do? Go sit on our coffins and wait for the inevitable?

We choose not to. We are too well-informed. Too battle-tested. Too hungry. Too dissatisfied. Too frustrated about the world changing too slowly.

The future is here already. No context is such that it couldn’t be dramatically improved by way of emergent capabilities with a value stream design approach. We keep proving this week by week, case by case.

‘Unrealistic’ is our game.