Copyright 2016 Daniel Egger All rights reserved. No parts of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the author. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Library of Congress Control Number: 2016906880 CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform North Charleston, South Carolina ISBN-13: 9781532942266 ISBN-10: 1532942265 Cover design by Daniel Egger Editing and English-language adaptation by Laurie Russo, PracticedEye Proofreading & Editing First Edition: July 2016 www.danielegger.com
FOR MY “KLEINE MAUS OLIVIA” AND THE OTHER “KLEINEN MÄUSE” IN THE WORLD WHO WILL DEFINE THE FUTURE.
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Filled with many practical experiences, this book cites cases from clients. While changed in content, industry or location, the learning stays the same. In extended examples, mentioning specific companies, I used publicly available sources. The book is about value generation. This includes customers, clients, users, stakeholders, producers and other participants in the value process, and I will use the terms interchangeably. Yet each term stands for people. “Why not call people, people?”—Don Norman
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Acknowledgments xploring the future isn’t about what a single mind sees or even predicts. Tomorrow results from the thoughts and actions of many people, who interact, reflect, and share. This book could not have been possible without this collaborative force. People I met at various times in my life inspired, provoked and exchanged new perspectives. Each left a strain of reflection; a stimulus. Others, I briefly interacted with, and may not be aware of their valuable contribution. More than a decade of discussions and joint reflections left its trace in my writing. The book would be incomplete without the diversity of experiences from a set of unique thinkers and doers. They took on the challenge to contribute with inspiring insights and foresights. I thank Aga Szóstek, Artur Arsénio, Diogo Dutra, Erica Orange, Érico Fileno, Harry West, Jeffrey Tjendra, Luis Gustavo, Malcolm Ryder, Maria Paula Oliveira, Mark Storm, Mattia Crespi and Norman Wang. I especially wish to extend particular gratitude to Malcolm Ryder and Aga Szóstek, whose writing and questioning of concepts stimulated new perspectives. Additionally, I thank Jo Roderick for his cover design insights. I am thankful beyond words for the support of my wife Eliana and my world-exploring daughter, Olivia.
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I deeply want to thank all: This book is the product of many.
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“The future belongs to people who see possibilities before they become obvious.” TED LEVITT American Economist and Professor
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Contents I CONTEXT 1 We start by exploring change, opportunity and design; how they are connected and their importance to creating new business logics. This initial chapter asks the reader to stay open minded, and establishes the groundwork for value generation. II INSIGHTS 45 The second part of the book will inspire you. Experts, thinkers and doers from the USA to Brazil, from Australia to Singapore share their experiences and insights. This section presents fresh ideas, a humancentered perspective, technological progression, and the creation of new value. III FRAMEWORK 123 The third part guides you through creating new business logics. It explores the integration of innovation, foresight and strategy. The objective is to make the organization more agile, facilitate decision making, and create new future value. xv
New value! hange is neither good nor bad. It creates different situations, and that difference is what we have to understand, embrace and explore as an opportunity. As organizations, we need to act. Only if we prepare, shape and take part in the ongoing changes can we create positive value in the future. This is where Future Value Generation comes into play. The logic integrates the importance of being different from Renée Mauborgne and W. Chan Kim’s inspiring book, Blue Ocean Strategy. It borrows the understanding of how to design new value from Simon Sinek and his bestseller, Start with Why. Finally, the book offers practical guidance, such as that found in Alex Osterwalder’s Business Model Canvas, with the goal of creating and implementing new value. This book builds upon those concepts. Its primary purpose is to generate new value, balance the technology with human perspective, and introduce a Framework that explores synergies and a how-to logic integrating exploitation and exploration, the present and the future. My hope is to contribute to a proactive shaping of the future that adds new value for organizations and their clients.
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How to Read This Book his book is for everyone, and as such, I have taken into account that there exist several ways of exploring. Each of us has different priorities, interests, and necessities. It was designed in modules. More precisely, three sections that create separate reading experiences. You can read just parts of it, and in any order. But my honest opinion is that the best reading experience is to follow the natural flow of the pages.
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No matter which path you choose to enjoy the journey, reflect and welcome to the future!
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One C ON T EX T
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Act! Our reality defines itself by people who strive for change. We dream of the possible—and the impossible.1 Eight-year-olds grow up with access to biohack kits and manipulate DNA. Coding is discussed to complement basic competencies as writing, mathematics and reading. My three-year-old daughter has a 3D printer, and access to IBM’s Watson using Cognitoys. And I’m working with her already on our next undertaking, a “Food Computer,” designed as an open project by Caleb Harpe and his team. Everything is getting hacked, changed and adapted. Driven by a curious mindset and equipped with boundless access to information and technology, we question, experiment and create new value. To those with a thirst to know more, no limitations of age, gender or national borders exist. Our society reimagines daily what is possible and plausible and each day, new logics and organizations are born. People’s habits, values and beliefs are in transformation, and the code of society is constantly being reprogrammed. Technology progresses exponentially, confronting us with wonders—and sometimes fears. Designers question how products, services, systems and whole societies work, redesigning their function to create new meaning. Endlessly curious people hack every aspect of society to create a world that makes more sense to them. New forms of relationships, from what Peter Drucker calls “stint” to the gig economy, from cooperation to competitive networks, join professionals who share the characteristics of purpose and trust. Startups test new logics, stimulate organizations to be more agile and mobilize people to constantly experiment. Finally, scientists blur the limits of reality, and science fiction humbles us in our knowledge of what we think is possible. In such a reality, where society no longer stands still, changing logics are the norm. Competition has no boundaries, and neither the past nor the present guarantees success in the future. For organizations, it means aligning the speed of adaptivity with the exogenous changes, recognizing windows of opportunity, and staying curious to understand the change and their clients, and improve business logic constantly. 3
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We need to act and embrace uncertainty as a pool of opportunity. If, however, we remain inactive or passive, we will fall behind further and further2 and our organizations can easily turn into absurd “dead and still alive”3 structures. Entities of the past, which don’t embrace change until we cease to exist. If we ignore designing for the future, someone else will do it for us. The option lies with us to either wrestle with past logics, or “build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”4
Faster and faster It feels as if the amount of change in the past 30 years has been compressed into 3. Technological progress is flattening society, eliminating past barriers, and delocalizing structures in all industries from health to education, production and even religion. Technology transforms society and the competitive environment as we know it. Richard Foster of Yale University estimates that the average lifespan of an S&P 500 company has decreased from 67 years in 1920 to 15 years today. The strategic competencies that define how we generate a different value for our users are shifting fast. Yet, no slowing is in sight. A study from the Babson College Olin School of Business estimates that 40% of existing Fortune 500 companies will no longer exist in 10 years.5 They will merge, go bankrupt, or simply drop off the list. We will forget many previously excellent organizations—Atari, Xerox, Polaroid, Kodak, Yahoo!, Nokia, Hilton, MGM or Blockbuster—and favor those who excel in generating new value. Each of those organizations had a challenge, and responded differently. Singularians argue that technology surprised them; designers believe they were too far removed from what mattered to their clients. Each expert has its position, yet for me it comes down to decision making and access to alternatives. Making difficult decisions and being continuously prepared will be critical for many organizations. Not only do organizations need to adapt, but also individuals and professionals. The 2016 World Economic Forum said in its “Future of Jobs” report—asking human resources and strategy officers from leading
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global employers—that 35% of the skills important in today’s workforce will change in 5 years. Yet, we cannot say we live a unique time of change. World conditions and preferences have always shifted. What, however, defines the present is that shifts are happening faster than ever before, and that we perceive it daily. No physical border and no barrier of competition can hinder progress. And we are only beginning to integrate even more people. With the number of Internet users worldwide more than doubling—from 40% in 20146 to 97.5% in 20507—a new consciousness is born. We will not fall asleep again.
More change The present and the future are about sense-making, about what we as humans value. Yet even our basic characteristics—what defines us as humans—are always changing. We are entering a time in history where purpose is gaining importance, new localized startups work in their own neighborhoods, preferring empathy over quantity of clients; a society where job security, career and defining success are undergoing profound transformation, questioning how we will live in the future. We are creating a progressive technological- and human-centric future (techno-human) defined by value, meaning and purpose. A society embracing the individual, filled with complex reasoning and emotions. In today’s ever-changing world, we need to accept uncertainty. Technology in the forms of Artificial Intelligence and algorithms can guide us in our decisions to be wiser, avoiding future negative effects. Yet complete uncertainty equals chaos and exploration makes little sense. Rarely do new possibilities still exist in pure certainty—if they do, they are already part of present logics. The solutions are not the extremes of complete uncertainty or certainty; we need integration8. Organizations have to define the limits what is possible for them. They define the Opportunity Space that lies between the present and the possible, the certain and the uncertain. To explore business
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possibilities in such an area, exclusivity of methods, methodologies or tools can’t apply. Each of them would focus on one part of the problem arguing its truth of the story. The solution cannot a focus on a predefined way of thinking or a process (How?), but must be context centric (Why?). Understanding why the organizations want to explore the space, and why people will perceive value from the offerings.
A techno-human future The United Nations Millennium Project is best known for its development goals: to reduce global poverty, hunger, disease, illiteracy and environmental degradation. In 2015, however, they started a new project discussing a topic—The Future of Work/Technology—that will affect billions of people. What are the implications on unemployment of the progressive technological advances in Artificial Intelligence and advanced robotics? Together with hundreds of worldwide experts, we shared our experience in an interactive survey. The participants of the real-time Delphi survey discussed that automation can produce mass unemployment of 11% in 2020 to 20% in 2040 on average, worldwide. Demanding as this scenario might sound, proactive futurists see the challenge as an opportunity. The increasing level of automation will allow us to be more human again. As the uptick in unemployment will affect many routine or highly process-focused jobs—without regard to education level—the technological progress will liberate us from the simplified reduction of behavior in jobs. Restraints that existed during the first industrial revolution will be lifted, and mass-production-line mentality will be a thing of the past. We might fear change, and need to adapt our way of living. Yet the increasing automation represents a tipping point in society where human attributes, skills and competences make us different again. Collaboration, interaction with communities, a focus on problem solving, critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, and managing 6
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people with a touch of service orientation—attributes that are not new to us. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that researchers from such varied fields of research as technology, organizational structure, management and geopolitics—including the World Economic Forum—have come to similar conclusions in their research of which future competencies and skills will be important. We enter a new wave of “humanized” economics in a technologically progressive reality, where human values, abilities and competencies are a source of differentiation.
Do not simplify—expand! Not only will the quantity of changes increase, but also the complexity of their structure, and their interconnection. One single change can’t negate past business logic; they do it together, acting as a joint force, altering the system from different angles. That is why when we talk about the future, we do so by mentioning not one shift, but many. We identify patterns and explore how society and technology change, search for communities that can go viral and explore early signs of change and map possibilities. Our goal is to prepare, to influence, and to identify new potential business logics and products, services and brand relationships. Yet whether or not we explore possibilities depends on our attitude toward the future, and if we are willing to go beyond “tweaks” in products and explore change in habits and logics. Yet for many, this step is too uncertain and distant from their business reality. So we filter, reduce, and want to do whatever is easiest. Our first reaction might be to ignore something new, or argue that it might be too utopian or not commercially feasible. We argue that a safe harbor should exist, as our present knowledge is sufficient for the future. Yet past success is irrelevant. The future will always arrive, and only those who embrace change will excel. Organizations that don’t incorporate new competences, new ways to prepare themselves for the change, will lag. If they try to meet new challenges using the reasoning, arguments and hypotheses of 7
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the past, they might solve the problem, but it will take increasingly more time. Without new organizational capabilities, they have less and less time to adapt to these new challenges, which will increase in quantity and complexity. Urgent action is crucial.9 If the organization is inactive, cultural distress builds up, leading to managing daily crises and fast, super-simplified decision making, a tactical response that cannibalizes mid- and long-term value generation. This way of responding to change drives the organization into constant waves of disorder, causing it to forget about creating purpose and exploring new opportunities that emerge. Interesting is that a focus on crisis management might save the day but will only postpone critical business decisions. The strategic relevancy for exploring the necessary changes to business logics and understanding the ongoing shifts only increases with time. A proactive attitude to the future is necessary. It leads to a higher level of agility and adaptation of the business logic to external change. Understanding the future means preparing strategic alternatives and counter-attacks before they are needed. By setting such a course, organizations identify risk and transform complexity into opportunity. We have to unlearn the old, and be open to and prepare for the new, not as a leadership development dogma, but as a strategic necessity, even if this demands hard decisions: Nokia was the pioneer of mobile telephony, and without its contribution, we would not be where we are today. During the glory years, the company reached a market penetration of over 50%. Shared millions of times, their design studies of future mobile phones created an organizational image that Nokia could be successful in the present without ignoring technological changes and people’s future desires. In the third quarter of 2007, everything changed. The reason: Apple launched its first iPhone. Created from scratch for the new reality, it questioned commonly assumed characteristics. The iPhone offered neither better call quality nor battery life. Instead, the competition boasted a new, flexible interface and a fluid user experience. 8
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Even though Nokia was technologically more advanced than Apple, they did not prevail. Users and their preferences changed beyond functional sales logic. Nokia fought, even denied, the concept of touchscreens.10 That was interesting, as many of their internal design studies and results of the crowd-developed future concepts used the technology, and even went beyond. After a period of downturn, Nokia tried to rethink “their” operating system, Symbian, to counter the change. Yet the hard decision to abandon it took too long. Their fear that “one hardware manufacturer could come to dominate Android,”11 similar to their indecision on Symbian, hindered their agility to adapt. Their political velocity of change was too slow. Nokia had the vision in their hands and the technology to create a unique and superior future market position. Their window of opportunity was short, and they missed their chance.
Embrace the new For basic survival, as for evolution, we have to accept the past as the creator of the present, influence the future, and act in the present. According to Sreekanth Chalasani, a neurobiologist at the Salk Institute of Biological Sciences in California, there is an “evolutionary” reason for our curiosity. New information supports better decision making, and allows adaptation in a changing environment. Curiosity drives the pool of insight and reflection, and we never know when it will come in handy. Yet curiosity is about the present. Our perceptions, imagination and understanding of today’s world define what we are curious about. Mark Storm, a thought leader in management from the Netherlands, states, “Curiosity is less about what you don’t know than what you already know.”12 Also, though it starts in the present, curiosity is key for the future. Questioning and exploring makes old knowledge and perspectives less sticky. It helps us to reduce the perception of uncertainty, drives us to understand new perspectives, and reduces biased decision making. We might not withhold judgment and never will, yet we can be more conscious. The more we understand different context, the likelier it is that we can generate a more neutral view of the future. Curiosity is essential to identify and act upon opportunity. 9
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New data When we search for new insights and ideas, we also need access to more information. This is where Big Data (context centered) and Design Thinking (human centered) come into play. Both logics allow us to capture a deeper understanding of different parts of reality, and to increase the data we have for the individual and its context. For the first time in history we have the opportunity to really understand our customers, enabling us to make more meaningful strategic decisions, and to define different questions. Mileha Soneji presented at TEDxDelft an emotional story. She has a deep connection with one of her uncles. He was always outgoing, fun and the life of the party at every family reunion. Then everything changed. Her uncle was diagnosed with a disease that slowly takes away individual autonomy. Parkinson’s Disease starts with a tremor in the hands, but as it progresses, the condition makes the simplest tasks complicated. Slow movements, stiffness and loss of balance challenge the body, and confusion, or dementia, impacts the mind. Driven by anxiety, people isolate themselves, causing depression. Parkinson’s is estimated to affect 6.3 to 10 million people worldwide, and in the USA alone, 60,000 people are diagnosed each year.13 Mileha is a designer at heart, and transformed the life of her uncle, giving him back his independence. She created a drinking cup that does not spill, eliminating public embarrassment. But what is even more astonishing is that such a simple design restored some of her uncle’s mobility. Embracing empathy, Mileha observed, interacted and immersed herself in her uncle’s experience. By doing this, she discovered that several Parkinson’s patients have severe problems walking on straight, solid surfaces, but are miraculously good at rhythmic movements, such as riding a bike or climbing stairs. This was already known, but equipped with a designer’s mind and the determination to improve the life of her uncle, Mileha made a difference. She designed a simple but effective solution. Printing out on paper a 2D stairway, and placing it on the floor throughout the house, changed everything. As her designed stairway creates a visual illusion, this perception triggers fluid movements in her uncle’s mind. This low-tech solution has the potential to improve the lives of millions of patients. 10
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Mileha only had these insights because she wanted to explore and help more. With known facts, she interpreted the data differently, and together with a humancentered and empathic perspective, created new positive experiences. The rate of success depends on our worldview and how well we interpret data, without filtering dislikes or extremes. We need to see society as it is—complex—and gain new perspectives. Access to new data will question past factors of success and even business logics. Yet we should not be paralyzed, but instead move quickly and boldly. Also, data is critical: The future of management is about decisions that balance the present with the future, and allow us to adapt to the changes.
Stay neutral Tomorrow is complex; created by millions—no, billions—of people, and we humans have our limitations, as we tend to think temporally. When faced with the “new,” we might judge, or ignore/exaggerate. We need to train our time perception, and turn time into a strategic ability to expect and shape change. The future isn’t about ceteris-paribus— one variable we isolate and study—but defined by interconnection and changing realities. We need fresh views, and to question the obvious. Texas was one of the most violent parts of the Wild West. However, it was not as bad as popular lore would have you believe. Historian Bill O’Neal researched documented shootouts during the “gunfighters’ era” and the results differ from the standard Hollywood line. In 1880, Texas had a population of close to 1.6 million, and one of the highest documented duel statistics of U.S. states. It counted 12 shootouts a year, or 1 a month. What’s surprising is that not only is the number of violent events very low, but so is the number of deaths. The key challenge during a duel was much simpler than we imagine. It was satisfactory for the shooter to hit the adversary anywhere. Yet even aiming might have been difficult when we consider that many shootouts took place after some time spent at the saloon. Skilled gunmen aiming at flying bottles or coins hardly existed. The primary consideration in the Wild West was not speed, but “accuracy.”14 11
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We need to question much more, provoke, investigate, and experiment. In the words of Friedrich von Hardenberg,15 “The goal is to turn the familiar strange and the strange familiar.” Our experiences allow us to deepen our knowledge in certain topics, the communities we belong to strengthen our relationships, and the day-to-day routine helps us to manage uncertainty and complexity. In other words, we simplify, filter and reduce—something we’re good at—and as a result, we create a pre-defined synapsis that allows faster, familiar decision making to avoid risks. We create what we perceive, and so our Mental Model represents only a “small-scale model of external reality.”16 The downfall of a simple worldview is judgment, a limited perspective, seeing parts of society separated from each other, and shifts as nonexistent. “Simple” is risky. It prioritizes the past, reduces the present and limits exploration of the future. We limit our interaction, perception and process to what we think is relevant. Because we don’t have a more holistic perspective, we don’t know about new opportunities. They just might as well not exist in our point of view.17 Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne researched “The Future of Employment.” Their goal was to calculate the probability of computerization for 702 occupations. They found that especially those jobs and logics that follow a pre-defined and simplified process, and are non-personal, have a high probability of being substituted by advancing technology. To prepare for the future we need embrace a fresh perspective, a broader view impulse by a curious mind. No trend reports, not a single person, no unique tool can be enough. The future is about the many. We need to investigate known premises, embrace intuition to identify patterns, and be more consciously aware of or biases. We need to question our and societal Weltanschauung, the view of the world. Can we afford not to see differently any longer?
Human centered For two decades, human-centered design has been in focus. Those organizations that embrace and integrate people tend to excel. 12
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The Design Management Institute researched in 2014 how designdriven companies compared to the S&P index. They found that those companies outperformed the index by 228% in the last 10 years. Since this news spread, more and more organizations started to adapt and focus on more human-centered value generation. Two years later, in 2016, in the recent PwC survey, 63% of U.S. CEOs18 set a clear priority to increase the value to their stakeholders by embracing purpose in their relationships. They want to intensify a connection with their stakeholders, making more sense, and placing them at the center of their business. Embracing design-driven thinking means not only listening to people, but connecting and understanding how they perceive value—and how this perception is changing. In MBA classes, we explored how our fellow students imagined the future and what they might miss from the present or the past. We heard stories about various issues, from the cost of living and social segregation to fundamental changes in interpersonal relationships. We heard such questions as, “Why did my wife only wish me a good morning on WhatsApp?” The most unexpected thing we learned was that many participants simply wanted their children to be able to play “without concerns” on the streets again. They wanted to feel safe again, to be able to trust others. This finding was so interesting to us that we explored the “trust” in relationships further, finding it useful in our projects on “the living space of the future.” Even though already part of the researched topics, we used these findings to create an affective link based on past personal experiences with the people who will visit the space. We created a more understandable future, because we took the lives and desires of people into consideration in the present. When we work on the future, it isn’t just about perfection or logic coherence, but also about how we can connect with people in the present; how we can mobilize their interaction with the new reality.
The importance of value We live in the age of technologically progressive development and human-centric design. But what does the individual want? Is it the “flow,” a “hyper-focus” 13
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(flow19), the full immensity of losing a sense of one’s surroundings? An extreme feeling of delight? Or is the user looking for “Erlebnis” (emotionally driven, intense moments)? Perhaps an “Erfahrung” (a positive, meaningful experience)? A “sensory perception” that creates new “mental models”? Or none of these, but instead a simple need to solve one’s problems? We can say that what people are looking for is to enrich their lives, to add value by interacting with our product, service or brand. Their intent does not follow predefined categorization of an experience, nor can we say they want only experience. A reduction of our cognitive load (the mental effort necessary), avoidance of friction (the unnecessary clutter), or just a functional solution are all possible options that design can deliver. What people want, however, isn’t static, and depends on the intent, where they are during the interaction, and the previous story—what happened before. For that reason I argue that we should generate value. This means that they gain something they didn’t have before. They come out of the interaction better. Using this definition, you will note that I don’t limit myself to any particular experience, function, product, service or brand. Value Generation embraces any kind of design activity, any medium, if it adds something for the user. Yet Value Generation also stands for creating a positive impact for organizations. They generate offerings, and for this effort they should get something in exchange for each interaction. Tangible or intangible, a flow of value must exist on both sides. This Value Exchange defines what is economically sustainable. The primary directive in such an argument is to understand people and the context of interaction. Value is about connecting, offering options that make sense in the specific moment and add value to people’s curiosity, intent or necessity. The 2015 KPMG CEO outlook lists stronger client focus (30%) as one of the key priorities for organizations. For tech companies, Forrester researched and found 79% of leaders20 set a priority to improving customer experience. Research by Gartner came to similar conclusions: 18% of marketing spent on improving customer experiences in 2014.
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And more than half of organizations (51%) were set to increase budgets by an average of 17% in 2015.21 The Economist coined it “The Rise of the Customer-Led Company,” and its task is simple: to create new value in the present and the future by placing the human in the center of strategic thinking and organizational planning.
The “Why” Still, simply embracing a human-centered strategy doesn’t necessarily mean that it pays off. Forrester’s Customer Experience 2015 Index concluded that 73% of organizations place people in the center, try to understand them, and create new experiences with their products, services and brands. Yet only 1% achieve excellence.22 So where does the challenge lie? For one, the fast-changing customer dynamics.23 the change in the patterns of what people value. A new technology might quickly change how people relate, how they express themselves and what they judge as important, changing their priorities. For example, at the time of writing, Brazil is embroiled in a highly charged political scandal, Europe is confronted with a never-ending stream of immigrants and refugees, the United States is in the midst of an extremely polarized presidential election cycle, and Russia’s political system is trying to survive by any means it can. At such times of uncertainty, it isn’t surprising that we change our priorities. As individuals, we lose friends and make new ones, express ourselves more radically, and ask ourselves how we can generate future value. As organizations, progressive development of technology impacts our value chain, production lines, logistics and efficiency. Simultaneously, business models are enhanced with a people-centric perspective, which questions how value is generated. Neither individuals, organizations, nor countries are unaffected by change. Yet change always represents opportunity, and if we embrace it and ask how we can contribute and excel in such situations, we can generate new value in the future.
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Simon Sinek refers to exploring what drives individuals as “starting with the Why.” He argues that we have to go beyond the “What” or “How,” and get to the “Why.” This, what he calls the “golden circle,” is the first step to exploring “Why” we exist and how we as organizations can contribute value to our users/clients. It isn’t surprising that when we explore the “Why”— the perception of value and not what the organization believes it generates—the answer is to look beyond the general attributes of quality, price and satisfaction. When we want to find the answer to the “Why,” we cannot apply traditional ways of exploring. Yet the three characteristics are so ingrained in our marketing and management discipline, and even in the client’s mind, that to change the worldview often is a challenge. Yet we should always go beyond and ask: “Why” is quality important? “Why” might the individual need to pay less? “Why” does it generate a feeling of wellbeing, and what experiences do we create?” Quality, price and even satisfaction represent production logic based on efficiency and functional solutions. Today we go beyond, integrate experience, and understand the moment to find “psychic” and “emotional” fulfillment. We balance and include the emotional perspective of perception, which “leads to action, while reason leads to conclusion.”24 Such reflections are not new. Alvin Toffler—writer and futurist— questioned in the 1970s the concepts of “productivity” and “efficiency.” He believes those concepts are no longer enough to drive future superior value generation. He contends that we will lose the need for psychic fulfillment, and the integral concept of property will be meaningless. Today’s sharing economy, driven by people finding new purpose, is a partial fulfillment of his “prophecy.” With a potential in value generation of $335bn in five main sectors—peer-to-peer finance, online staffing, peer-to-peer accommodation, car sharing and music and video streaming, 25 the people-centered perspective will recreate societies, ecosystems and industries until 2025. Accepting that value perception is shifting, we have to ask: How is value changing, and can we proactively take part in the shifts? Do we know the “Why” so that we can adapt the “How”? 16
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Or in the words of Friedrich Nietzsche, “He who has a why to live for can bear any how.” • • • •
Why people live their lives as they do? Why do they judge, relate, and believe as they do? Why are they happy or unhappy? How does technology change the “Why”?
Today’s “Why” is indeed a bit more complex than sticking with the traditional value attributes of price, quality or satisfaction. Functionoriented sales arguments and macro generalizations are simply too commercially driven, and only serve to annoy people. The seemingly simplified solution is no longer compelling. Individuals ask for new value, expressed by experiences and purpose. Value that makes sense to their reality.
Meaningful experiences and delight What is your organization’s strategic goal? Should your organization generate solutions, provide meaningful experiences, or even “delight”? Why? Imagine you check into an exclusive hotel at a breathtaking beach resort. You spot an attractive person whom you’d like to meet during your stay. When you open the door to your room, you see it has a devastatingly beautiful and vast ocean view. You are relaxed, and deeply happy. After a pleasant dinner, you turn in early, as you plan to watch the sun rise and do some exploring. Then it starts. You hadn’t realized it at first, but there are mosquitoes in the room. You hate mosquitoes, having been traumatized by them in the past. So you can’t sleep. Every time you think you’ve caught them all, more appear. Overbooked, the hotel can’t help by moving you to another room. With no other choice, you give up and try to sleep. Exhausted, you finally fall asleep at 3 a.m., and wake up too late to go through with your original plans. Your arms and legs are covered in bites. To cleanse your mind, you open the terrace doors to see the ocean. You feel calm once more. You watch as a cab approaches the hotel entrance, and the person you’d wanted to meet gets in, luggage in hand. You realize you’ve lost the opportunity to get to 17
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know the person. The hotel staff can’t give you a name, and you didn’t take a photo to post on social media. “Worst vacation ever,” you say to yourself. “A terrible experience.” “If you think you’re too small to have an impact, try going to bed with a mosquito.” KEVIN ROBERTS, Lovemarks The story illustrates the challenge we face in designing meaning and perception. Could we reduce the possibility of mosquitoes? For sure. Can we design for better matchmaking? Possibly. Can we design a certain meaningful experience, or even delight? Most likely not. Meaning is about perception, the context, and the prior individual story—it is complex and unpredictable. We might explore a more holistic, yet incomplete, perspective, imagine the possible actions the guest could take, collaborate and generate a set of new ideas. Yet still we would prioritize. We would have resource restrictions implement all solutions. There is no certainty in design; no “equation of the word.”26 Too many unknown variables exist, and besides, it would make living in the present much more difficult—and boring. Meaning results from the emotional and cognitive moment in a specific setting and time. Value Perception is illustrated in the story as both complex and singular—one small detail can change everything. The moment of consumption fades fast, so it’s our emotional and cognitive load—the total amount of mental effort and emotional balance necessary—which define our patience and tolerance for not-so-perfect experiences. So the question isn’t if we can design meaningful experiences or even delight, but if we can design for it (with many options). As we cannot offer certainty, we offer alternatives that might create surprises, reward interactions, and engage different behaviors. This also means that we design not just the interaction, but also an ecosystem that in the perfect sense incorporates relationship, product/service/brand, and experiences—and if we are lucky, we generate meaning. 18
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A challenge One ongoing change that asks for an adaptive design and new business logics is the fluidity of gender. Countries such as Argentina, Denmark, Ireland, and the Netherlands have altered their laws to make it easier for people to change their officially registered gender. This gives them the ability to express their identity with fewer barriers, and often a less invasive or even no medical exam. Despite our biological gender and socially perceived gender in the physical world, we can be whatever we like in the digital realm. We can assume different genders (or no gender) in the digital or physical worlds, in our mind and body. We perceive ourselves in different ways, exchanging experiences from different roles. It isn’t surprising that social networks were some of the first to embrace the change. Facebook gives the user the freedom to choose between 50 (USA) and 71 (UK) gender options. So you can be androgynous, neutrois, trans, two-spirit, or anything you wish. The freedom of choice is yours. But how do you design meaningful experiences for such diversity? How do you create meaning in a society that in only 50 years went from a women’s rights movement to a push for the right to have no gender? How can we design adaptive experiences for our products/services and brands? What new business models can you think of?
Designing From an organizational point of view, we might be satisfied “just” to design products, services and brands that create experiences. If those, however, result in meaning or delight, remains an unknown. This doesn’t mean we should not strive to understand what creates delight and meaning, and incorporate the best available information from design research or Big Data in our analysis. Yet, even though we consider all the information we learn from hindsight and data from past events, our designed experience is set in the future. Perception of value is complex, and in constant flow. So we design solutions that unfold as experiences27 and stimulate meaning, yet whatever solution we offer, and method or methodology we use, we need to add new value for people. What this value looks like 19
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depends on the users and their context, but also the organizational possibilities of creation. To further explore the design of experiences, meaning, and delight, I invited Érico Fileno and Aga Szóstek to share their practical insights. Érico is an Experience Designer and will explain his views on meaning and delight. Aga is a world citizen and a design expert, and gives us practical thoughts on how to capture the context and integrate a value-centered perspective into the design process.
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Meaning and Delight—How to Build a Positive Experience Érico Fileno M.Sc., Strategic Designer and Service Innovation Leader Since 1995, Érico has been designing software, appliances, devices, websites, products and services used by millions of people every day around the world. During this time, he has also worked on user research, design thinking, UX strategy, service design and interaction design for global brands. @efileno We live in (and are still feeling the effects of) a moment of transience in design. In similar aspects as in business, design began its dematerialization process at the end of the last century. Defined by the collapse of manufacturing processes, and the trend away from mass production towards the service sector, we are now witnessing a major change in how we understand people. The focus is no longer on the product, in either form or function. Design strives to question and create new, useful products—the service you want to offer—and the affection established with people. Donald Norman calls this integration user-centered design—a contemporary vision of design, which prioritizes and puts the human being in the center. According to Marty Neumeier, placing people in the center of organizational thinking builds and strengthen a brand, but organizations can only profit in this new reality if they create loyalty with their customers. However, Steve Diller, Nathan Shedroff and Darrel Rhea, authors of the book Making Meaning, highlight that only focusing on brand development is not sufficient to satisfy market demands. They propose the creation of meaning for people, which goes beyond tangible or intangible goods, products or services. Meaning is only generated through experiences generated by the product or service.
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1900s
1950s
2000s
Focus on products
Focus on branding
Focus on experience Meaning benefits
Emotional benefits Identity building and status benefits Functional benefits Economic benefits
Evolution of innovation and consumer demand28
If we study the conceptual understanding of “meaning,” the root word is related to “value, meaning or semantic content of a sign.” From a semiotics perspective, “meaning” is the external value of the sign—what denotes something for someone. The search for the construction of meaning for people has led design to the extremes of its production, as we are no longer working with the materiality of design, but with the development of new and immaterial signs. This passes from the construction and branding of identity, to a debate on experience-driven products and services. Connecting this to the ideas of Marty Neumeier we see that loyalty doesn’t only occur by building brands nowadays. It connects stronger with the experience perceived by using a particular service or product. It is important to establish a distinction between product and service, which is fully connected with the immateriality of design and businesses today. A service is a complex system of interactions that occur between people or between people and artifacts over a given period. Each of these interactions is relevant in the final experience perceived by each client. Moreover, a product becomes the avatar or the physical manifestation of a service and can mediate each of these interactions.
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According to Dave Gray, “Services cannot be designed and manufactured in isolation, as products do. They are created in conjunction with consumers and are interdependent with networks and larger groupings of services.” Joseph Pine and James H. Gilmore add, “When a person buys a service, he or she purchases a set of intangible activities that are carried out on his behalf. But when he buys an experience, he pays to spend time enjoying a series of memorable events that a company stages—as in a theatrical play—to engage him in a personal way.”
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN MEANING AND DELIGHT: EXPERIENCE WITH A SIGNIFICANT VALUE PROPOSITION
An experience can be described simply as a sense of change in our environment, our body, our mind and our spirit. It is a conscious result of our relationship with the external environment. Every day, every moment, we perceive good and bad experiences interacting with people, products and services. It is with this guidance that companies and businesses must be conceived and constructed.
THE EXTREMES OF A BUSINESS FOCUS The model of Stephen P. Anderson presents the two extremes of a business strategy. At the base are the companies focused on tasks, with strong appeal to products (materiality), which prioritize functionality and usefulness (work as planned). Next, organizations direct their efforts to making the product reliable, available and consistent. Third, they focus on making their products easy to use, mainly through usability studies, yet this doesn’t mean they succeed. Fourth, companies reach the layer of convenience. This stage determines the conversion of a task-driven-business to a user-experience-driven business. This is because convenience is fluid, with no friction. On the fifth point of the pyramid, companies focus on making pleasant user experiences that are worth sharing. Finally the company’s goal is to build meaningful experiences, those that have a personalized meaning to consumers.
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User Experience Hierarchy of Needs model (Anderson, 2011).
We understand that when organizations reach the final stage— positive meaningful experience—it is because there is delight in relation to use of this product or service. People consume enjoyable experiences. Such a significant positive experience (delight) appeals to our sense of well-being with the use of a product or service. This sensation comes from a biological, psychological and social response to the interaction. The context of the sense of well-being is defined by culture, with its relationship to an ecosystem that people designed over time.
IMPLEMENTATION OF DELIGHT Businesses focused on generating new user experiences work strongly on the cognitive dimension of experience (meaning) first, but quickly adapt the concepts to create a significant positive experience (delight). Meaning and delight work together, and both are necessary to develop a sustainable Value Proposition.
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The value of a product or service isn’t defined by how much the organization wants to receive, but how much the consumer is willing to pay for the product or service. So this is why it is important to understand that the business offerings have to generate meaning in people’s lives and involve them to mutually create a positive significant experience. Considering this perspective, we need to consider during the construction of a Value Proposition, two aspects: Meaning as a denotative view of the business, and delight as its vision. Their interaction creates perceived value. User experience-driven businesses are already prepared for the future of consumption.
The Tricky Business of Empathizing with Users Dr. Agnieszka Szóstek, Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts Dr. Agnieszka (Aga) Szóstek helps companies to develop an experience-centric approach to designing services, systems, and products as a strategic advisor, mentor, researcher, and designer. She is also an adjunct professor and experience design lecturer at the Design Department of Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts, and a Visiting Professor at the Institute of Informatics at Tallinn University in Estonia. Empathy toward customers should be the foundation of designing future experiences that build people’s loyalty by catching their hearts. Empathy can be defined as “an intuitive ability to identify with other people’s thoughts and feelings—their motivations, emotional and mental models, values, priorities, preferences, and inner conflicts.”29 Empathy enables us to gain an intimate understanding of an experience a given product or a service should offer. The experience is “a chunk of time that one went through—with the sights and sounds, feelings and thoughts, motives and actions […]—a story, emerging from a dialogue of a person with her or his world through action.”30
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Thinking in terms of experiences rather than products and services helps us to discuss not only functional, but emotional, needs of people. In the times we live in, when practically anything is technologically possible, it is the ability to offer meaningful experiences that convinces consumers to choose one brand over another. I am a great fan of Booking.com. One situation blew me away, and made me a loyal customer of theirs. I traveled to a conference in Canada. At the airport, I learned that due to miscommunication about visas, my plane ticket had to be canceled. Can you imagine my stress level? My flight departed, while in three days I was supposed to give an important presentation… and I was stranded. Not only that, but I’d booked an expensive hotel and I was about to lose money, as hotel cancelation was only possible up 24 hours before arrival—24 hours I no longer had. Utterly distressed, I called Booking.com and explained the situation. After listening to my story, the representative said: “Madam, don’t worry—I will do everything in my power to cancel your hotel room with no additional costs.” I still remember the feeling of relief I experience when I realized that in this complete mess, where everyone and everything seemed to go against me, someone offered help. To cut a long story short, my hotel room was canceled with no penalty, and I fell in love with the company. I am quite convinced that the way my case was handled resulted from someone at Booking.com empathizing with different situations and contexts people might get themselves into, and weighted the value of an immediate gain versus long-term customer satisfaction. You might wonder why more companies don’t share this philosophy. Most likely, because defining present and future contexts is a tricky issue. First of all, the phrase itself is ambiguous. Does context mean something that happens between people and products? Or perhaps it relates to an environment in which they interact? Are emotions a part of the setting? How about values, motivations and beliefs? The notion of context gets even more complicated, as the same thing can be seen with different eyes by different people. Do you remember the hotel room you recently stayed in? Typically, we think of it in the context of a tired traveler who sees the space as shelter for a
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night. But the same room can offer a radically different context to a member of the hotel’s staff, who keeps cleaning the room day after day, or a hotel manager who sees it purely as a means to increase the revenue of the company. Context can change depending on a situation. Remember the last time you waited for a taxi? You might have anxiously wondered whether you’d manage to catch your plane, or if you’d be late to an important meeting. But you might have been visiting friends and hoping the taxi would take its time, as you didn’t want a great evening to come to an end. The last problem with context is the fact that we tend to idealize rather than see clearly. In one project I worked on, we conducted a shadowing study on people running online stores. Shadowing is a technique where a researcher closely follows the users in the context for at least one day 31 to get a glimpse into their real lives. In this case we imagined people running online stores to have dedicated spaces for storing their products, neat accounting, and well-defined logistics. The reality turned out to be much more messy and multi-dimensional. We saw people running their businesses from student rooms or sheds. Some users appeared to be well organized, while others could barely find their inventory. We saw two men running the exact same type of business located on two sides of the same street: One was extremely successful, the other nearing bankruptcy. Both of them, naturally, viewed either success or failure in connection with the online platform offering them the space to sell their products, which we were designing. This richness and uniqueness of individual context is what makes the design of future solutions so difficult. It is exactly such contexts that are infinitely creative and full of inspiration for new products, services and experiences. So now you understand why context is difficult to define. Difficult, but not impossible. Let me share my approach to dealing with that. Imagine you are a part of a team designing an application that aims to support post-stroke patients in the process of rehabilitation after being released from the hospital. It isn’t likely that you have first-hand experience with this particular topic. Is there a way to understand the context in which the users will operate?
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STEP 1 I always start with looking for a good question to ask. Many questions tend to have an idea for a solution hidden in them. For example, the question gaining insight into game console usage to perform rehabilitation exercises at home assumes that a game console is the best solution, which may not necessarily be true. A good question only focuses on the context. So, I would opt instead for this: What is it like to be a person recovering from a stroke, just released from the hospital and needing to recover at home? What concerns, feelings and attitudes do they experience throughout the first phase of post-stroke rehabilitation?
STEP 2 Once I’ve defined the research question, I try to face my own assumptions about the context in which these users live. This exercise aims to get personal preconceptions out of the way, so I can face user context without personal bias. It also sensitizes me to the different aspects of that context, and helps to come up with good follow-up questions. Recognizing my assumptions also helps to verify which discoveries came from user research, and which were the intuitive guesses of my team. Typically, we deal with our assumptions by preparing a mind map illustrating them in a brainstorming session.
STEP 3 With the assumptions out of the way, it is time for user research. There exist a great variety of methods that can be applied to each consumption occasion. Depending on the context, we conduct a series of interviews where a team member takes the role of an apprentice learning how to live the life of our client. For other projects, we deploy a diary study where customers report daily on the questions we supply them. Often we run observations together with co-creative sessions with participants. But my absolute most favorite method is called Cultural Probing,32 which, although time consuming, delivers outstanding insights into the world of users. A Cultural Probe is a package of exercises designed to provoke participants to reflect on the various aspects of their current and future experience. Let me share one of Cultural Probe projects we conducted for a Polish telecom provider called Play.33 28
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We were asked by our finance department to redesign invoices. It is worthwhile to realize that an invoice is the most pertinent means of contact between a company and its customers. After facing our own assumptions and going through a series of sensitizing interviews with different customers (individual clients, small and large businesses, and accountants), we realized that dealing with an invoice cannot be brought down to mere usability of the document itself. We wanted to discover the characteristics of good and bad invoices, what happens to an invoice once it arrives at someone’s home, and what should appear on an email accompanying the invoice. We also wanted to understand why people choose one payment method over another, and what the reasons are for not paying an invoice on time. So, we took 30 Play customers on a journey. With the help of three master students from the Design department of the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts,34 we created a package in a form of a traveler’s suitcase, which contained six packages, each with an assignment for one day.
The level of engagement was spectacular. The results made us realize that the one piece of information most asked for was how much money they were expected to pay—a piece of information concealed in the old version of the invoice. But we also found out that paying an invoice gives 29
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people a positive feeling of task fulfillment, and that when they don’t pay their bills, it’s not because they want to cheat the company, but because they either forgot or didn’t have enough funds. In both cases, they were sorry for the delay and willing to apologize. Those insights led us to some ideas surrounding the payment process (for example, sending a “thank you” text message after payment was received) and also for new services, which we would have missed otherwise.
STEP 4 To complete my understanding of user context, I always run a creative workshop, which gives the team a chance to reflect on captured experiences together with participants. Typically we ask participants to once more tell their stories, while visualizing them in a new situation. One tool we use is iScale,35 a visualization technique that helps users to draw a curve of their experience while describing the turning points of the interaction. The team is left with a shared perspective about contextualized experiences, bits and pieces of unrelated information.
Photo by Joanna Kwiatkowska
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STEP 5 Although user stories might at first appear quite individualistic, it is possible to derive common patterns out of them. A pattern-forming exercise typically happens during yet another creative session conducted internally with the team. Why are the users not invited? You could always consider including them, but it’s important to remember that although users are great sources of information about needs, and great evaluators of the derived solutions, they are not designers. So it is the responsibility of the design team to come up with scenarios of future solutions that aim to address these needs. This helps us to create solutions that go beyond “physical consumption� and discuss the need for consumption that appeals not only to the mechanical act of using a product, but also to building emotional engagement.36 By using this process, we hope to build positive and meaningful experiences that make people happy, and as a result, loyal to our company. q
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Time “Time is our scarcest resource, and much more valuable than money.” PHILIP ZIMBARDO Time itself is a source of competition and market differentiation. It is a powerful weapon for competitive advantage. Time plays a key role in efficiency theories, portfolio management, and managing product cycles. Organizations are always looking for new ways to reduce, optimize and streamline it. Time is a key asset. The good news is that the importance of the “time factor” will increase, and when we work with foresight, we use time to our advantage. We anticipate, prepare and learn from the future so that we can reduce uncertainty and make better decisions in the present. With it, we create alternatives and influence the future. As easily as time can benefit us, it can also work against us, especially when we have crises to solve, and are trying to reduce the negative implications of external change. How many times have you asked for more time? Does a lack of time cause you stress? Time has the potential to create resiliency and agility. It holds the key to organizational competitiveness as we gain extra resources for preparation. We can move beyond problem solving and anticipate the creation of new business logics and solutions. Finally, exploring the future is also about the past and present. Born in the past, we will die in the future. Until this moment arrives, we bear the power to influence reality with our presence. Uncertainty is part of the logic, and ignoring it is to miss an opportunity.
The Future The future fascinates people for different reasons, and we are endlessly curious. I even would say it is part of human nature, and an obsession. 32
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Many people grew up with Dick Tracy, The Jetsons or Star Trek, and therefore see a future full of possibilities. For others, the future is an escape pod. They live by their own imagination of a better world, risking disconnection from the present. As humans, we are wired to think about tomorrow on a daily basis and try to plan, envision and influence. We do so not alone: Billions of people transform societies around the globe. Due to the constant flow of information, we lose our points of reference. The increasing speed of change leaves us puzzled. Even values, the core of culture37—which we grew up with—are in transformation. In such a reality, it is natural to experience “future shock,”38 or as Salim Ismail, author of Exponential Organizations, puts it, “Our amygdala is freaking out.” It’s a state of emotion where our instinct—how we are biologically wired—takes over as a reaction to a society changing at a rapid pace. This is similar to what we experience when we travel to a foreign land. Faced with disrupting our values, we rarely know how to respond to unknown cultures. We experience a “culture shock,” and to overcome such disorientation, we need time and immersion in the new reality. Working with the future is similar. We can try to ignore how different tomorrow will be. Or assume the change will have no implications. We shall not! “We have discovered that people fear the future. It frightens them so to the extent they prefer to live in the present or, worse, the past.” MALPHURS
A flashback of foresight The future has been part of mankind since its origins. Its story is an interesting interplay of arrival and survival. The urge to know more about the future took us in the last 3,400 years from Pythia, the famous Oracle of Delphi, to today’s academic Foresight PhD programs. Unlike in the past, no serious futurist today claims to be a prophet. 33
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They’ve learned that only parts of the future reality are known, and that predictions are not about certainty, but about creating a better understanding. Several hundred years passed before we arrived at this stage of maturity, where we see the future not as something divine, certain or known. In 1763, after long wars that transformed values and national borders, Samuel Madden published the book, Reign of George VI. It was the birth of exploring the unknown, the dawn of speculative fiction39. He made the first structured forecast of the future. Madden introduced a new way of thinking by imagining other circumstances for mankind. As with Roger Bacon’s (1260) technological vision40 or St. Thomas More’s (1516)41 “imaginary voyages,” he was quite taken with the future. Madden connected new future realities with the present, exploring progress beyond mere utopian aspirations. In his book, he determined that the future is and will be different from the present. It is neither divine nor a questionable prophecy. His work ushered in a period of “professional horizon watchers.”42 The future has since been a source of fascination for many writers, from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engel to Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. Those thinkers shared their ideas about the possible and imaginary. Science fiction entered popular culture in the 1950s. Futurists such as Alvin Toffler and Daniel Bell brought this genre of the imaginable into the mainstream. Inspirations surged, new forms of entertainment exploded. But the temporal perspective was still distant from the common businessperson. Herman Kahn, a military strategist and system theorist, filled in the blanks. He translated the future into a logical process, scenario planning. The logic represented the missing link of planning and future thinking.43 As “the father” of prospecting, he argues that the present is more than a static extrapolation of the present. It isn’t a vision, but a discussion about conceivable alternatives. However, the proposed process was not simple, but embraced the diversity of society. Herman Kahn’s suggested process of scenario planning asked companies to do extensive research to thoroughly understand the changes. Organizations, feeling uncomfortable executing such a complex method, simplified it and adjusted scenario planning to their current mindset, reducing society to a snapshot. The picture was static now, 34
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and a mirror of the present, simplified and linear, incremental and determined by sequential thinking.44 When the oil crisis in the 1970s hit, many of the self-proclaimed forward-looking organizations were insufficiently prepared. They saw the fault as Herman Kahn’s prospective process, not their own simplified application. It was the trigger point in ending the “hype” of future exploration.
Strategy and foresight The 1960s were a time when society underwent profound transformation. It was the era of subcultures, emancipation, disintegration, emotion, and technological progress. The era had no limitations, and has earned such monikers as the “golden age,” the “years of lead,45 and “the age of the student.” Yet what the ’60s represented, beyond all doubt, was an age of uncertainty. The increasing upheaval challenged organizations of the time. Trying to lead with an unstable reality, they experimented with new logics. They institutionalized rigid management disciplines with the aim of creating structure in the midst of societal uncertainty. Planners became highly regarded in such organizations. Companies created new budget departments and established, for the first time, mission statements. The goal was simple: to create a manageable condition, an intervention to push the future toward a state of order. They established their controllable, plannable and predictable illusion. It was the birth of the disciplines of strategic planning and strategic management. Executives wanted to set a north, planning the details and decision making to achieve it. Strategic planning presented itself as the solution of the time. It set priorities, agreed on goals and adjusted actions to the new external challenges. But organizations abandoned the concept of planning as fast as they’d adopted it. The discipline was too stiff, too control focused. In an environment of escalating uncertainty, predictions failed to deliver. Strategic planning was literally invalidated in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s by socioeconomic shocks46 caused by the Vietnam War, Arab oil 35