The future is digital, but not in the way we think

 

The future is digital, but not in the way we think

The question I get asked most often in conferences around capability building is, “What skills should I focus on, to be successful in a digital future”. I’ve always suspected that’s a loaded question. After all, if you ask a Global IT executive that question, you’re not expecting a response of “circus trapeze artist”, but most likely some variation of “computer science”. However, as an aside, are you really sure you want to ask any type of expert a question about the future? You see, when experts are wrong, they can be horribly off the mark.

When experts go horribly wrong

Consider these opinions from very reputable people about the future.

“Television won’t be able to hold on to any market it captures after the first six months. People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night.” — Darryl Zanuck, executive at 20th Century Fox, 1946

“The horse is here to stay but the automobile is only a novelty – a fad.” — President of the Michigan Savings Bank advising Henry Ford’s lawyer, Horace Rackham, not to invest in the Ford Motor Company, 1903

“The Americans have need of the telephone, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys.” — Sir William Preece, Chief Engineer, British Post Office, 1876

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." Thomas Watson, president of IBM, 1943

"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." Ken Olsen, founder of Digital Equipment Corporation, 1977

Oops!

You might charitably call these “a swing and a miss”. More bluntly, you might wonder what these guys were smoking when they said this. After all, these were all experts in their field.

So, should we be asking any type of expert about the future?

The future is digital.

Seriously, everyone knows that the future is digital. But, what the best visionaries and change leaders know is that this statement cannot be taken literally. The risk with being literal is that you go down rabbit holes of technology in an attempt to find digital versions of products (digital ice cream?), services (digital dry cleaning?) or work processes (digital financial analysis?). To be fair, some of these are important ingredients for the digital world and they are future-oriented. However, they are all means to a digital end.

What most successful change leaders do, is to understand the context of the world around them, and then deliberately go about creating the future by marrying their own capabilities with future trends.

Where’s the future headed?

So, what key context should we examine regarding the digital future? Here’s a few examples I’d like to share to make a point about a digital future.  This is what technology will bring to future life as we know it.

-              Driverless cars, which were just a dream a few years ago, have gotten to the stage where children being born today may never need to apply for a driver’s license.

-              Between 40-50% of jobs in the manufacturing, transportation and retail sectors could be done by hardware or software robots in the next 15 years.

-              Even robots in manufacturing will be disrupted in the next 10 years, as 3D printing takes over. If you can print your PC or smartphone at home, you eliminate robots in the factory.

-              Certain news agencies already generate 90% of their short, pro-forma real-time news updates on sports and financial markets using software robots. Artificial Intelligence (AI), with some human journalist help will generate 90% of all news in 15 years.

-              Voice recognition is already 3 times faster and more accurate than typing. In the future, Natural Language Processing bots will understand and execute most of the day-to-day tasks at home and at work.

-              Deep Learning can already read your lips with more than 90% accuracy, while the average lip reader usually delivers 50% accuracy.

-              In 20 to 30 years, the cost of producing energy at home will be a fraction of the cost of buying it off the grid.

-              More importantly, it’s the consequences of cheap electricity that are more exciting. Cheap electricity means cheap drinking water, as energy allows you to process all kinds of water including sea water.

-              In the next 5 years, there will be apps that can tell by your facial expression if you’re lying. Imagine what that could do to the judicial system!

Wait! Don’t all these examples simply illustrate the criticality of building technical capabilities? No. Not necessarily. Let me share one final statistic to explain why.

-              Over the next decade, modern manufacturing in the US will create 3.5 million new jobs. But, up to 2 million high-tech manufacturing jobs may go unfilled for lack of higher-skilled factory workers.

You read that right. In this case the gap will not be in IT programmer availability but in factory workers who know just enough digital technology to operate high-tech machines.

Follow your passion, but in a high-tech way

The future world will need lawyers, and bankers, and CEOs, and businesspeople, and teachers, and nurses, and sanitation workers, and cooks, and accountants, and priests, and factory and farm workers, and yes, politicians. Recent studies on the workforce of the future have demonstrated that beyond a technical digital skills shortage, the bigger skills gap will be related to right brained work. The future of the ice cream business isn’t necessarily a dystopian one where bits and bytes replace a snow cone, but in reimagining how we might better meet the need of ice cream consumers using digital technology. Design thinking, imagination, visual and intuitive product and service design, change management, bringing your organization along – these are all on the critical path to a digital future.

Obviously, this doesn’t take away from the need for a minimum level of digital literacy. We will all need a certain minimum amount of high-tech WITHIN OUR RESPECTIVE FIELD. That technical knowledge doesn’t have to be a one-size-fits-all skill like AI programming. It must be relevant to your field. So, if your field of passion is say, teaching, then keep building capabilities in that area. But ensure that you study enough digital teaching skills so that you can be the most relevant leader within the teaching field.