We will be unprepared, we will be uncomfortable

As 2012 winds down its final days, (we finally may even see some snow here in Western NY, and by the way, what has happened to Winter?), it is pretty common and natural to start thinking past the holidays and celebrations and look ahead, just a little bit, to the future. For most of us, 'planning' consists of at the organizational level preparing a set of 1 or 2 or 5 year forecasts for basic metrics like revenue, profit, headcount, locations, etc.  And in our personal development, plans (such as they are), often involve attaining that next step on an existing career path, achieving additional expertise or certifications, and maybe even some non-work goals like getting into better shape, or seeing the Taj Mahal. In both contexts, organizational and personal, these exercises are necessary and sometimes even helpful, but they are certainly kind of routine and often fail to adequately prepare our organizations and ourselves for radical or disruptive change that we know is coming, but we think we lack the framework or capacity to plan for.

Recently Google made news with the hiring of prominent 'futurist' Ray Kurzweil, who is most noted for his prediction that by 2045 human and machine intelligences will merge into something he calls the 'singularity', a state whereby superhuman machine intelligences and people will co-exist in a previously unimagined state of being. Other firms besides Google have engaged futurists as well, and some commentators like this one quoted in Business Insider, recommend that every corporation needs a futurist.

I think the key reason for organizations to spend a little bit of time, if not actually engaging a 'futurist', but at least thinking expansively and creatively about the future are best summarized in the BI piece from Peter Bishop:

"There will be significant change within our tenure within any position within our lifetime for sure, that we will have to learn to live in a new world — to some extent. It's not completely new the way some futurists will say. But it will be new enough that we will be uncomfortable, we will be unprepared, and that we will have to learn new skills and new techniques in order to be successful in that future compared to how we are being successful today, or indeed how we were prepared to be successful when we were in school or training."

What are some of the wild, speculative types of questions you should consider asking as you think about next year and beyond?

What if the levees don't hold, i.e., what if some remarkable external action or event renders us unable to operate?

What if our largest competitor starts giving away the product/service that accounts for 64% of our sales?

What will we do if the CEO, CFO, C-insert-any-letter-you-like-here-O resigns unexpectedly? And goes to our most-hated competitor?

What if our VP of Marketing approves a TV commercial that is so off-key that our Facebook page and Twitter feed are inundated with outraged customers?

What if Kurzweil is right, and machine technology advances incredibly quickly, making existing ideas about manufacturing, distribution, and marketing mostly obsolete?

I don't think that any credible 'futurist' or any forward-looking and curious Talent pro like you can credibly get away with endless blue-sky postulating on some of these really unlikely or fantastic scenarios. But, I do think it worthwhile to carve out just a little planning time and energy, (10%, 5%, maybe even 2%), thinking about the future not just as an incremental extension of the present, but as a potential wildly and radically different environment from today.

While you might not want to get a reputation in the office as the 'Kurzweil' or out of touch dreamer, I would also submit you don't want to be known as the 'status quo' person.

We KNOW things will change. It's (part) of your job I think to figure out what.

Happy speculating.

What if no one wants to drive to your office?

Back in January I posted a piece titled, 'Will Facebook Kill the Car?', a look and some commentary on research that indicated American teens and twenty-somethings are driving much, much less than previous generations. Shame on you if you don't remember my take from January, but in case you've allowed your own life, work, families, and worldly concerns to interrupt your thinking about what I think, here is a snippet from that piece, (trust me, I have something new to say about this after re-set) -I should have stayed home

It turns out American teenagers are driving less than their predecessors, and the article offers some interesting speculation on why that may be the case.  From the BBC piece 'Why are US teenagers driving less?' 

Recent research suggests many young Americans prefer to spend their money and time chatting to their friends online, as opposed to the more traditional pastime of cruising around in cars.

Here's more from the BBC:

In a survey to be published later this year by Gartner, 46% of 18 to 24-year-olds said they would choose internet access over owning their own car. The figure is 15% among the baby boom generation, the people that grew up in the 1950s and 60s - seen as the golden age of American motoring.

The internet, and by implication the social connections and activities the internet empowers, (mostly via Facebook), is the gateway to freedom, mobility, coolness - all the things that the car used to represent to the teenager or young adult.

Great stuff, no?

But seriously what jogged my memory about that old post was a commentary I caught over the weekend on Forbes.com, penned by legendary Detroit auto executive Bob Lutz. Titled, 'Generation Y Going Nowhere, And They're Fine With That', the piece isn't about Gen Y's career prospects, or lack thereof. Rather, especially seen through the lens of a grizzled and self-proclaimed 'car guy', it's an examination of the fading importance, excitement, and even utility of the car, and more essentially, the diminishing need of Gen Y, (and truly, not just Gen Y), to actually go somewhere, as opposed to experiencing it all virtually and via social networks.

Lutz talks about the social networking serving as a viable and even improved replacement for things like basic social interaction, commerce, entertainment, dating, and just hanging out with a group of friends on a Friday night. From the Forbes piece:

Armed with the capabilities of their ever-more sophisticated iThings, replete with social networking enabling close, immediate exchange of thoughts and experiences with countless “friends,” who needs to actually get in a car and go to a drive-in?

Financial transactions, purchases, games, movies…all rendering travel to banks, stores, sports events or theaters redundant. Generation Y stands at the forefront of the next chapter in mankind’s evolution: experiencing everything while going nowhere.

We mostly think about new technology and the rise of the social web as contributing towards making our experience of the real world better, more complete, and somehow richer. It's fun to live Tweet at an event, and to share on Instagram and Facebook that killer Key Lime Pie you just made. And when we can't actually be somewhere, we can at least partially experience the real world through the what is being shared online by those who are.

But Lutz takes the argument to its next stage of progession and certainly while coming off a bit old-fashioned and 'get off my lawn-y', he at least raises an interesting question for anyone tasked with mobilizing the next generation to actually go somewhere and be physically present somewhere.

What if they simply would rather stay on the couch, connected to everything and everyone they need, with their iPhones, iPads, Google Glasses, and the dozens of better gadgets that are sure to come?

What if you opened an office or workplace and nobody came?

Sound crazy to you? Maybe it is.

Well even the NFL, the most popular sport in America, is having trouble getting people to actually come to the games. And I bet your office isn't nearly as fun as the Dawg Pound.

Happy Monday! 

Robots Selling Cookies

According to a recent article in Business Week, the next wave of robot technology is aimed directly at the office market - robots that can file papers, deliver mail, and fetch a coffee for their human bosses.

These robots, according to Noriyuki Kanehira, a systems manager at robot manufacturer Kawada, will soon be able to take on a 'secretarial role' in offices. Joe Bosworth, the CEO of a firm called Smart Robots envisions these office robots as being able to 'take mail down to the mailroom and then travel across the street to pick up a latte.'

The price for this robot convenience for mail delivery and latte fetching is not cheap - prices on the current wave of office assistant type robots can run as high as $400,000 for a model called the PR2. Thankfully the PR2 comes with an associated web app called 'Beer Me' that allows the robot to be programmed to fetch and deliver beer from the fridge.

As with any new workplace automation or productivity technology, there will be some that will sound the alarm that the coming of these 'smart' robots will be the doom of more actual human workers.  Despite the high price, and (for now) somewhat limited application in the office environment the robots have many advantages over the humans they might replace.  Again from the Business Week article the robots 'doesn't goof around on Facebook, spend hours tweaking its fantasy football roster, or require a lunch break.'

When presented with that kind of a cost-benefit analysis, I imagine some executives might see the value in replacing some clerical and administrative employees with robot counterparts.  'Let me see, $300K for an employee that is never late, never gets sick, never complains about Judy's music in the next cube, and won't be hassling me to buy Girl Scout cookies every year?'.  Sounds like a good deal.

But for these leaders that might eventually make those kinds of decisions, there is another, more intriguing element to the 'robots in the office' angle. At Georgia Tech, researchers claim to be making progress on robot intelligence that will allow them one day 'to build robots that can not only interact with humans but are also capable of representing, reasoning, and developing relationships with others." They developed an algorithm that, they claim, allows robots, just like CEOs, "to look at a situation and determine whether [it] requires deception, providing false information, to benefit itself.'

Nice, not only will future robots be able to sort the mail, they will be able to be programmed to have Enron-style ethics and behaviors. Sweet.

Will we see the day in the foreseeable future where robots are as common around the office as pot-luck lunches, pedometer giveaways, and fluorescent lighting?  Perhaps.  But one thing seems likely to be discovered from the development of robot intelligence designed to replace and automate common workplace functions - that the line of irreplaceable human skills and intelligence is probably much higher up the managerial food chain than we like to think.

If what you are spending your time on today can be replicated by a robot, you are already in trouble. And if you think your contribution is on a high enough level where it can't be truly automated, think about it this way - if all the people that you support and direct were actually replaced by robots, then what would you do?

For laughs on a Monday - another take on the distant future of robot domination (email and RSS subscribers will need to click through)