Upgrade Your Mindset to Become Future-Ready.
The following is adapted from Future Ready.
We’ve been through several historical eras where technological advances dramatically and permanently changed our personal and professional lives. We have models like Moore’s Law that help us understand the rate of technological change and its ramifications.
Wise individuals have pointed out that though digital transformation is the primary driver of the massive changes we’re seeing, the technology is the predictable part. The human and cultural aspects of change are nearly always more challenging and complex than the technical aspects, in our experience.
In a recent study and workshop connected to Global Summit, Singularity University’s flagship annual conference, we found that survey respondents considered mindset to be the most important factor in driving future innovation. In fact, having the right mindset—individual and organizational—is a prerequisite for success in any innovation initiative your organization will tackle.
For every industry and every size organization around the world, change is accelerating at an unprecedented rate. It’s ever more exciting, and ever more unknown. The speed of change is breaking all of our old models and paradigms. And if you don’t act, these new technologies, business models, and shifting market dynamics will break your business.
After all, no one could have predicted huge industry shifts like this:
The world’s largest transportation company owns no cars.
The world’s largest hospitality company owns no hotels.
The world’s highest-valued media company owns no content.
This future staring us in the face promises an accelerated pace of change that we’ve never seen before. Digitization allows businesses to reinvent practically all aspects of their organization and value chain, to jump across industries, and to create and distribute value in wholly different ways than ever before.
Reimagining Business
For years, many traditional businesses achieved growth by managing supply chains and operations. The typical multi-layered bureaucratic organization was built intentionally to de-risk its operations and scale incrementally. Businesses could grow simply by making slightly better versions of existing products.
The goals were to increase top-line revenue, gain market share, and max out the efficiency of existing processes. This method helped cut costs and grow companies for many, many years. We’re used to this traditional model of what it means to be an organization.
We no longer live in that incremental world. Technology has shifted the pace of change from incremental to exponential.
The transportation industry provides a clear illustration of exponential change. At the turn of the 20th century, a big leap in transportation technology was from horse and buggy to cars powered by fossil fuels. Today, we’re completely rethinking how to get from point A to point B, and a convergence of technologies—from smartphones and apps to worldwide Wi-Fi—has made it possible for us to move around the world in ways we never expected.
Do you need to own a car? Is a car still necessary to get from one point to another? These questions have led to innovations like the development of Uber Air, an aerial ridesharing service set to debut in 2023 that will enable people to summon a flying taxi through a smartphone app.
Honda is taking a different tack on the future of transportation: they’re working on IeMobi, a portable room that detaches from your house to become a self-driving car that takes you where you want to go. We are completely shifting what it means to move around the world.
Our rapidly changing digital world is enabling us to ask questions and consider solutions that were once limited to sci-fi culture. For example, one solution to the future of business travel may be to reduce or eliminate business travel. Instead of logging thousands of miles on airplanes to attend meetings around the world, imagine turning on an augmented reality (AR) headset to see and hear meeting attendees as if they were in the same room. If holographic images of people could deliver an experience indistinguishable from an in-person meeting, would you need to leave your home office?
Rapidly accelerating technologies like augmented reality and virtual reality (VR) now enable us to have realistic collaborative experiences in a virtual world. More broadly, groundbreaking technologies like AR and VR allow each of us to rethink our entire approach to business challenges. Expand this idea to every individual, organization, industry, and society on the planet, and it gets hard to wrap your head around—let alone predict—the impact of this kind of disruption.
One thing is certain, however. As executive coach Marshall Goldsmith said, “What got you here won’t get you there.”
For more advice on upgrading your mindset, you can find Future Ready on Amazon.
Nick Davis is the prior VP of Enterprise Solutions and current Faculty Chair for Corporate Innovation at Singularity University. Nick is a recognized thought leader in the innovation space who specializes in identifying exponential trends that enable enterprise organizations to deliver customer value through new and existing technology platforms. Nick is also a Venture Partner at Bold Capital, which invests in high-growth startups that leverage exponential technologies. He’s previously served as External Innovation Leader for PwC and the Director of Corporate Development for The Anderson School of Management at UCLA.
