Stay Human
In order to succeed with digitisation, we need to discriminate technology.
Note: This was actually a presentation I held in Sofia on “Innovation Explorer“ earlier this year. But I’ve reworked it from a 30 minute presentation into an article for you to read.
Let me start off with a little story! One of the first questions I got asked as a design leader, was asked by a gentleman in his mid-fifties. This happened after I had finished presenting the education options all our employees could embark on to understand the role of design better. The question that came out was “What is design?” I was dumbstruck, and I couldn’t really conjure up at good answer to such a fundamental question. And in the light of the development of design and its role in the digital economy, the question is a good one, though it lacked context.
I wish I had a good answer already when he asked that question, because I didn’t do a very good job answering it, I simply wasn’t prepared for those kind of questions.
I mean, I never think a business leader ever have had to answer the question; “What is business?” But once you give it context, such as what is the role and responsibilities of business in the new digital economy? Then it makes sense…
So I sat down after the talk, and thought about just that. “What is design?” But who would have thought writing a definition for the very field your are working in could be so difficult? Many hours, tens of discussions, and an unhealthy amount of cups of coffee later, I landed on the following description;
Design is an integral part of our customers decision-making. It is interpreted as a systematic creative process that is visual and experimental and is centred around human experience and behaviour. Through crafting solutions to real issues and utilise design at multiple levels; visual, interactional and holistically, we strive to understand what drives their decisions. The outcome can be graphical or physical, products or services, customer experience, systems or business models.
In short, design has a critical impact on user decision-making. Decisions lead to actions, and user actions drive the bottom line.
It’s hard to draw the line between traditional human factors and what we might call ‘customer-experience’, aimed at human-centered design of interactive systems. Bell Labs was one of the pioneers in making this transition, starting with the first psychologist hired to design telephone systems in 1945: John E. Karlin. By the 1950s, Bell Labs definitely did UX work, in particular on the design of the touchtone keypad.
That we use its design to this day is proof of how important it is to get the UX right in the first place.
And it seems that more and more we are realising this fact, and hence the need for knowledge experts, such as designers and researchers, and people within the fields of humanities have been soaring through the roof these past two years. The expected growth until 2050 will dwarf anything we’ve seen so far. Many drivers of the growth in humanities and design are not immediately apparent to most people in the field. But if you thought it was hard finding the right people today, then you will be in for a surprise the next couple of years.
Let’s say that you have to make a journey that will make you take 50 steps. But the next step I always twice as long as the previous. The first step is 30 meters, the second is 60, the third is 120 meters and so fourth. By step 20, you’ve done a lap around the earth, and on the 21st step you’d be done with lap 2.
That is exponential, and it’s applies to almost any industry when comes to the speed of technological development.
Remember that in such a curve, half your journey happens in the last step you take. We are in no way prepared to foresee this kind of a curve or synthesise this amount of data.
No human have the intuition for this growth curve. Nature simply hasn’t prepared us for this.
The paradox of trying to keep up with knowledge
Technology is not the only thing following this growth curve, it also mirrors the half-life of knowledge. Today game changing knowledge lives as long as a mayfly.
Let me explain using the words of one of my favorite writers Yuval Noah Harari from his book “Homo Deus”.
“The more data we have and the better we understand history, the faster the history alter its course, and the faster our knowledge becomes outdated. Today knowledge is moving with such neck-breaking speeds, and theoretically we should understand the world better and better. But the very opposite is happening. Our new found knowledge leads to faster economic, social and political changes, in an attempt to understand what is happening, we accelerate the accumulation of knowledge which leads only to faster and greater upheavals. Consequently we’re less and less able to make sense of the present or forecast the future.”
So with these words in mind, and while you are trying to make sense of it, let me tell you that in order to stay relevant, we need to constantly improve and learn new things every other year. So we really need to invest in knowledge experts. To be able to disrupt, you need deep understanding of human behaviour and peoples’ needs.
As this curve shows, for the first 35 years since the 60s and the dawn of computers, the need for designers in this domain grew from around 10 to 1000.
As you can see, this is a thousand fold increase over 35 years
Then from the mid-eighties up to now it continues on its steady climb… it’s kept a steady increase by a thousand fold. From 1000 to a million in 2016. And remember this is exponential! So towards 2050 Nielsen/Norman Group has stated in their reports that they expects the need to soar to 100 million, which is the equivalent to 0.8% of the worlds workforce. And we are witnessing that these numbers are real, between 2016 and 2018, the number increased from 1 million to 2 million! So in two years, it doubled.
But as of now, we are not enough people with the right skills to meet this demand of even 2 million! Let alone, 100 million as predicted in just 30 years from now on!
The Fourth Industrial Revolution
Digitalisation, “the fourth industrial revolution”, changes not just business models and markets, but also how we work and how we behave. Smarter digital solutions demands greater insights into who the actual users of the technology are, us! — humans and our needs.
The fourth industrial revolution is the greatest disruption ever. This time it’s different, it’s exponential, polarising and combinational. It’s all about cyber-physical systems. It’s different this time, as the digital has become so powerful and omnivore that it has affected every industry and every value chain. And it’s the winner takes it all.
New digital experiences such as AI, AR/VR, energy, biotech, fintech, blockchain and automation — to mention a few; These are all what can be called “Gutenberg moments”, and they are all happening at once, and they create a potential endless combination matrix of opportunities. These are technologies, but with it comes challenges that you need to meet with knowledge, understanding and insights. But not just any knowledge; knowledge is worthless, if it doesn’t change behaviour. And knowledge that changes behaviour does not live long today.
Skills revolution
50 years ago, knowledge moved more slowly, so when we had knowledge about something, such as the knowledge of the telephone, or the knowledge of how make great film for photos — we could rely on that that knowledge would keep us at the top for maybe a decade or two at least, sometimes much longer. These days we can’t, since we can’t predict even 6 months ahead.
Another thing about knowledge I really hadn’t given any thought, was that knowledge also has a half-life timeline. And after doing research on this, I found out that the half-life of knowledge in the last 50 years has decreased from 30 to 5 years. So as with education, back on the 60s you got an education, and that was your job — and it stayed like that for 30 years. But nowadays you educate yourself and after 5 years, that knowledge is not longer contributing to change, or it has lost its relevance. And you need to constantly refill and refill that backpack with other skills across competencies to stay relevant.
The problem is that throughout the world we are not educating nearly enough people with the skills needed, and even if we ramp up the efforts by educating more, we will not get there in the next 10 years. So we need to think differently to attract and upskill the right talents in order to meet demands. And we can’t rely on the younger generation and millennials to fill this gap alone. We need as many as we can get…
Because there are still a few vital things we can’t rely on technology to do for us, and that is the human interpretation of the world. The world isn’t logical… our frameworks are not consistent or complete. We are faced with multiples dilemmas everyday, impossible dilemmas — how do we navigate that? There are things that we can’t delegate to the amazing tools that we will have in the future.
According to the McKinsey Global Institute, robots could replace 800 million jobs by 2030, and according to Klaus Scwab at the world economic forum, an equal amount, if not more new jobs will open up. And recently Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba Group just said at the world economic forum that;
“If we do not change the way we teach, 30 years from now, we’re going to be in trouble.” — Jack Ma
The old knowledge-based approach of “200 years ago”, will fail our kids, who would never be able to compete with machines. Children should be taught “soft skills” like independent and critical thinking, art, values and team-work.
We are faced with multiples dilemmas everyday, impossible dilemmas — how do we navigate that? There are things that we can’t delegate to the amazing tools that we will have in the future. Skills such as: Social skills, fine arts, critical thinking, complex problem solving, and working in true cross functionality!
Investments in acquiring behaviour changing knowledge and the ability to use it to forecast user behaviour and needs, I think will be the differentiator in the future, knowing what people don’t know themselves yet, is how design and user research can be the most important type of innovation going forward. As technology becomes cheaper, and the “S” curve flattens out and makes technology a commodity, only those armed with this kind of knowledge can disrupt.
We need to embrace the importance of these soft skills, creative skills. Research skills, the ability to find information, synthesise it, make something of it. And we can’t wait for our children to grow up and fill these gaps, not even the millennials of today would be enough. We all need to learn new tricks, and it needs to be the stuff that computers can’t do better than us, we need to stay human.
