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This absolutely hit the mark for me – resonates with so much I’ve seen, heard and read and I agree with the findings. But, I think there is something else going on here which Coivd-19 has accelerated hugely. About 7 years ago I did a presentation to a group of senior HR executives at one of their annual events and mentioned that “employees are consumers – just wearing a different hat’. What I went onto say was that in the mobile era, consumers had (in reality in some cases and in perception in others) taken much more control of what and how they buy – online, via apps like Instagram, through influencers, by click & collect – the changes are endless and have only continued since that talk. But the underlying shift is essentially a move of the power towards the individual consumer and away from providers and sellers. 

So much has been written about the massive numbers of people thinking about or indeed quitting their jobs. But there is less consensus and less debate on the drivers for it – frequently it’s narrowly focused on the benefits / drawbacks of working from home vs the office. There is talk of purpose, culture or values (or perhaps the lack of them) within corporates, a lack of flexibility in working from home, or uncertainty over what hybrid working will mean. But maybe, just maybe it’s all of those and something a little bit deeper and simpler – maybe we just want control of our lives back, in the same way we feel more in control of buying things. For some people (and many more than previously) they no longer want to accept that their earning capability is dictated by their employer.

That’s always been the dream for many – and entrepreneurs talk about it a lot although in many cases, it means long, long hours, high risk and a high potential failure rate. But Covid-19 highlighted the profile of that ‘freedom’ in a way that simply had never happened before, Suddenly the structure of the daily commute fell away, the school run became a home schooling planning session (a mixed blessing!) and the joys of gardening became apparent.

All of which sounds idyllic – and it wasn’t, and isn’t, for many. BUT, the glimpse of something else that is possible, a recognition that 10 hour plus working days, long commutes, on call 24/7 is not necessarily the rest of our lives, has created a restlessness, a dissatisfaction, a desire to try something different. The rise of alternatives to fulltime paid employment isn’t a bed of roses, and if left to evolve, may indeed lead to huge progress, but also huge inequality. There are lots of examples in the gig economy where that shift of power to the individual remains illusory. And it’s not for everyone – but, as this data from GoRemotely shows, the rise of the self-employed, either as a full-time or part-time occupation is global and increasing.

Oops, missed a few months there – and now there’s a crispness in the morning air, some glorious colours starting to come on the trees and I’ve realised that it’s summer over, autumn is here. Not a problem – I really like autumn.

But I’ve also realised that the summer (at least here in the UK) wasn’t exactly like summer as I remember it either. The whole thing of each of the four seasons being distinct is less and less true. We’ve had fabulous Februarys in recent years, and horrible Julys for example. And the more I think about it, the more that blurring of boundaries is increasingly true for many aspects of business.

Think of the tech sector for example – and just how many organisations are labelling themselves ‘tech’ when in reality they are simply tech enabling their operations. Just what is a ‘tech’ stock these days is a really interesting question.

Then look at other sectors – and the blurring of lines between media, data, information finance etc – think about a company like Nutmeg – yes it’s a financial services investment company but it is also about information – it’s business model (and the regulatory environment) requires it to provide a lot of information in a way that used be done F2F.

And the blurring of corporate boundaries – collaborative participation such as Network Rail & the Samaritans, or Apple’s Developer Network or Foldit illustrate just how porous some of those boundaries are in terms of key aspects of the business operations.

So blurring of some really traditional boundaries is increasingly common, acceptable and frequently very positive. The trick is to know where staying within boundaries is the right thing to do, and where blurring is a plus!

Having written about books previously I thought I’d better mention that the one I’ve recently contributed is now out and available – congratulations to Sarah and Bob for their efforts in herding cats. Love to have your comments . . .

I’ve been working with KPMG around trust – as the critical currency for organisations to be successful and thrive in the future. The thinking here is that in our connected world, it is no longer feasible to focus on one or two key stakeholders – connectivity means that there are many different stakeholders and to grow means working effectively with all of them. For some, financial performance (to my mind the traditional metric of success with stakeholders) is still key – but looked at collectively it is too narrow, hence the broader currency of trust. Trust being built in many different ways, and top line growth/profitability just one of those routes.  Indeed, some of the complexity lies in the fact that the alternative ways of delivering trust do not appear to be on the face of it to be compatible with one another. Digging deeper, routes to success lie in achieving that compatibility and reconciling the alternatives (potentially over time even if not simultaneously).

But from that premise, I’ve been musing on where connectivity requires broader definitions elsewhere. And so, I’ve been thinking about strategy.  Strategy seems to me to be a somewhat thankless task in these VUCA times. To go deeply enough into a medium term strategy has traditionally taken time and resource – but that time means that the completed strategy is often at risk of being superseded by events or by disruptive elements in the sector. That is the thinking behind Shaping Tomorrow which I’ve mentioned before – to have an automated process for as much of strategic planning as possible to make the creation of strategy a rapid, and hence if need be frequent, event. Or there is the Google approach – review strategic priorities every 90 days (bearing in mind that Alphabet and Google may now have different approaches to this).

I’ve also been working closely with Blueprint for Better Business and thinking about purpose – to my mind a much misunderstood and overused term in the business world. The various challenges around strategy led me to wonder whether, like performance, this now requires something broader – and whether in reality the framework for organisations to thrive is now purpose. Strategy then becomes (like performance) one demonstration or lens on the wider purpose (ie like performance it is not redundant, but now part of a menu).

Going beyond strategy, purpose sets the boundaries for innovation but does not constrain ideas and insights to the purely incremental or business as usual (which is often the practical reality of strategy as communicated, even if not the intent). Purpose can inspire and motivate people and communities, and hence foster self management and decentralised decision making within an aligned and coherent whole. Purpose can align partners and networks around a common goal or achievement, even where the agendas of the players are different.

And to come back to the thinking on trust, purpose which is key to reconciling the engagement of, and building trust with, multiple stakeholders.

My last post focused on tolerance of ambiguity – my latest ‘card’ on the shift from scarcity to abundance – in this instance in relation to the potential impact of 3D printing on replacement human organs.  And to me there is an enormous link between the two. Really since the dawn of mass commercialisation, our business models have been predicated on scarcity – even mass manufacturing serving really to highlight how appetites stimulated by scarcity and rarity (not that many Maseratis are made) can be met by cheaper mass produced models (the model T Ford being the classic). The decisions around operating models and pricing are therefore linked to how scarce I choose / have to make my offering. When I worked in research level publishing, there simply weren’t that many libraries / institutions working in some of the fields that we published – so the price of those books was geared to the tiny market size. Equally, Rolls Royce choose to create an incredibly high class product and charge accordingly in comparison with smaller and more mass market cars. Whilst the optimum decision is not necessarily easy the model is widespread and established.

But just look at how many assumptions are challenged in the business models based on abundance. Assets are owned not by the customer but by the providers / suppliers who may also be users / viewers /customers. Pricing is more transparently related to quality but is not necessarily homogeneous (think about the range of prices on Airbnb for example). Audiences are less mass market segments and more about tribes – tribes whose values may be similar within themselves, but where the values from one tribe to another may vary hugely. And abundance is opening up markets that never existed previously – how many of the artists and craftsmen on Etsy would previously have had a global market available to them?

And this requires a huge tolerance of ambiguity around business models – the recognition that pricing and marketing principles that worked well in the past will no longer be optimal necessarily in the future. Other people’s views (especially if more comfortable in the digital arena) may be as, if not more, valid. And new competition may arise not only from left field but within timeframes that we traditionally think of as project cycles at best.

In this context tolerance of ambiguity is really about the ability to question the status quo, to reassess fundamental assumptions (many of which are not even necessarily overt assumptions), to be humble enough to admit that not only does one not have all the right answers but that for some questions there are in fact multiple right answers. Because part of the problem with tolerance of ambiguity is understanding just what the phrase means . . .

In my talks on megatrends I almost always finish on what I think is the key leadership skill of the future – tolerance of ambiguity. And it is beginning to dawn on me just how difficult / rare this is to find in business. This week I was talking at a global mobility conference – concerned with the ability to provide people around the globe in timely, productive and cost effective fashion. So demographics, technology, working patterns, automation etc were all discussed. But at the end of the day, my suspicion was that most people wanted to know the answer to a binary question – in the future will we or won’t we move people around the world to work?

I have every sympathy with the group tasked with achieving that today – after all international regulations, tax jurisdictions, budgets, pace of change, pressure on talent are all factors which make this hugely difficult. But when you look forward it seems to me that there is only one real answer to their question – Yes and No. Meaning that there will still be roles for which the personal, hands on, physical presence is essential, but at the same time there will be other roles which have traditionally been done in person which can be handled remotely or through an alternative route.

This is by no means a unique example – it just happens to be the one that is current to me this week. And it illustrates the business mind set – to pretty much all commercial questions there needs to be a one size fits all (and hence definitive) answer. But what is increasingly clear is that there are many alternative futures and technology is presenting us with more options all the time. At the same time, customers and users are becoming more demanding, have higher expectations and are accustomed to ever more levels of personalisation, whether in terms of product, service or experience. The one size fits all option is therefore highly unlikely to be the right way to go either from the demand or supply side. So many questions may get answered with Yes and No.

And that is where the tolerance of ambiguity comes in because so much of the corporate infrastructure is designed to create efficiency – efficiency which is predicated on economies of scale. And in the same way that the internet has created abundance (rather than scarcity) in terms of markets, it seems to me have created abundance in terms of solutions. Finding the right match for the right customer therefore goes beyond the efficient here’s the one and only solution, to the agile and adaptable – how can we have a basket of options that handle what our customers want in an efficient way?  The discussion of such agility tends to move rapidly to digital enablement, technology solutions, platforms, automation etc but it seems to me that culturally agility is simply not comfortable for many people’s mind set. The possibility of providing multiple options with the same (or better) levels of efficiency as before sits in the ‘does not compute’ box.

And none of this is surprising – tolerance of ambiguity has never been high on the list of attributes for high performance historically. Decisiveness, clarity of vision and purposeful action are all much easier and comfortable to recognise and deal with. So, in amongst the rest of the issues around creating agility, how to achieve a mind set shift to tolerate ambiguity, alternative futures, or solutions which feel radically different (potentially impossible\) to history becomes a major hurdle.