Doing business in a complex world means looking past straight lines

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Is your software investment/community/engagement strategy going to drive revenue?  That’s a very important question, so let’s treat it that way.

Here’s a conversation going on between some of the most influential thinkers in the world today about how business is changing.

Consider this question with two things in mind: buying committees and non-linear “customer journeys,” where prospective customers don’t just avoid straight lines, they don’t event spend most of their time thinking about a company with that company.  They spend most of their time talking about or reading about that company with other people entirely.

Gartner says that only 20-30% of IT investments have a *direct* business impact. The other 70-80% have an *indirect* impact – and that’s often where the *biggest* impact is made.

Superior strategy, since at least the days of the Roman empire, takes into account strategic sequences of events, not simply single cause-and-effect moves on the chessboard.

(Below, a great Gartner graphic via Bob Apollo via Gartner’s Hank Barnes.)

 

 

Nexus causality is a concept that says almost everything is caused not by one single thing, but by a whole nexus of contributing factors, many of which may be necessary but not sufficient.  This is hard for the human mind to comprehend, so we tend to look for a single factor to attribute all causality to.  The factor we feel like we might have the most control over – often feels like the convenient one to point to.

Asking whether something will have a direct and immediate business impact is not the right question.  Asking whether something is a strong leading indicator of success, whether there’s high or increasingly high correlation between a thing and success, those are better questions.  Asking whether a thing can provide substantial competitive differentiation, and then basic competence can take care of the last mile, that’s an interesting question.

  • no independent origination, as the buddhists put it … which is tough for science, which needs to cut parts out of the whole, and for anything dependent on the quantifiable ..

    which brings us to the need for having the wisdom and sensitivity of awareness to be able to determine that which we call qualitative …

    my rupees are the the qualitative being far more important to the human future that the quantitative ..

  • Thank you sir. Here’s how one author put it that I really liked.

    “If we seriously want to develop superhuman intelligence & powers in the 21st century we have two options. We can continue to invest heavily in our technotopian dreams of creating machines that operate better than humans. Or we can invest more of our consciousness & resources on educating and consciously evolving human futures with all the wisdom that would entail.” – Jennifer Gidley. Gidley cites “post-formal reasoning” as an example of human consciousness evolution we could invest in: “Post-formal reasoning includes complex paradoxical thinking, creativity & imagination, relativism & pluralism, self-reflection & the ability to dialogue, and intuition.” Gidley concludes one of the final chapters in her very good book: “the human futures terrain is vast and complex, and this chapter should be read as the beginnings for a conversation that has barely begun.” In A Very Brief Introduction to the Future