Trend-spotter-spotters and the next step of competitive data science in business

“What we think will take ten years will likely take two or less,” says Frank Diana, Principal in Business Evolution at the $80B IT services firm Tata Consultancy Services, in a recent blog post. 

I think the near term future will be characterized by…
* Overwhelming media & tons of choices   

* On-demand economy

* Automation, AI, and personalization 

* Post-scarcity (effectively, for some), price wars, and tiny profit margins
In these circumstances, the value of a source of future knowledge will grow. So the best data will be data that points toward a source of data in the future.
In fact, as the future gets ever-closer to the present because of accelerating change, foreknowledge of the future will be valued like fuel that’s necessary to get there.

Today, big data is largely focused on personalized targeting of future buyers of products. Based on correlations and past behavior, that’s a finite set of data and seems like it would have diminishing returns.

I think the focus of data science in the future will be less about slicing a prospective customer up a thousand ways and more about foresight into what emerging things more prospective customers will be interested in across months and years into the future.

Analogy: You know how all the fast food restaurants are now competing to be the healthiest, the most ecological and the most comfortable? In the future, they’ll compete to identify those forthcoming trends as early as possible and they’ll compete to find the best experts on identifying those trends as early as possible.
2 yrs from now, I think companies will seek the best independent minds for advice on fast-moving markets, like today they seek advocates to sing the praises of their brand on the social web.
Today’s equivalent influencers would be Chetan Sharma or Kirk Borne – master synthesizers.
As the accelerating pace of tech and cultural change collapses the future into the present, businesses will compete over knowing now what they will compete in directly later.  They’ll compete in searching for the best algorithms and the best thinkers with foresight.

We’re entering a time in which multiple forms of exponential change will combine and their combinations will have a huge impact, in addition to the technologies themselves. That’s from futurist Gerd Leonhard, who illustrates the point with this graphic by Frank Diana – from this KPMG talk. (KPMG Executive Symposium on Automation + Robotics)

I love this graphic.  And I love the idea, frightening as it may be.  In political science, there’s a term for when you’ve got so many crises going on all at once that their sheer quantity is itself a crisis as well: a crisis of crises.  The prospect of multiple exponential changes combining reminds me of that.

You know what part I want to play in this? The one described here: The unsung massive 10 year disruptor: Automation of knowledge work

Care more about other people, but care less about what they think of you. 

That seemed to be a key message from day 2 of Internet maker festival XOXO.  The details that made up the presentations were compelling. Good show! Far more in-depth write-up of Day 1 here. 

It’s great to see people who are making the social media we all use or consume gathered together and encouraging that kind of perspective, prioritizing empathy.

Here’s my account of the seven remarkably well-curated sessions at Day 1 of Internet culture-maker festival XOXO in Southeast Portland, Oregon. 

This is my first year at the event, for which I had to apply to be granted a submission to a drawing to get a 24 hour window to pay $500 for a ticket, or some such process several months ago. It’s been here in my town for several years and this year my darling wife said “put it on the credit card and go if you can!” (Free video of all the following will be on YouTube soon though! Plus, see sketch notes.)

I’ve been working full time on the Internet 10 years next month and I saw a lot of faces I recognized – as well as many I did not. It’s a little overwhelming so I’m hiding in a dark corner of a feminist-alligned bar down the street, writing this on my phone plugged into the wall. (I’ll add more links later.)

XOXO is about people struggling to make careers for themselves making the Internet, and thus the world, better for themselves and humanity. It’s about art, science and commerce, as far as I can tell. I’ll go watch some short cartoons and films, maybe play some video and tabletop games, after I finish this.  It’s kinda Portlandia, but not screwing around. 

Founding era blogmother Dooce kicked it all off, with the words “hairy vaginas” in 400 point font and the statement “I am the motherfucking queen of the mommybloggers.”  She talked about the price of multimillion dollar success (exploitation of her crying children who didn’t want to be photographed in yet another faux-happy staged situation), her decision to walk away from The current state of sponsored content and back to authentic gritty life-affirming blog posts and photography. 
Then the NPR Planet Money guy talked about how his fame as a media creator opened doors for him but did not lead to fast VC funding for his startup. (Yup!) He had a great quote that summed up the XOXO ethos well: “You’ll never be able to explain the thing as well as you can show the thing.”  -Alex Blumberg https://gimletmedia.com/show/startup/
Then comic trailblazer and successful publishing company founder Spike Trotman  http://spikedrewthis.tumblr.com took the stage. She’s a young, Black, smart, high energy, an early adopter of Kickstarter who said: “I’d say I’m grateful, but I worked hard for this! It’s a combination of ‘how on earth did I get here?’ And ‘yeah, I worked hard for this!'”  
I’d like to read multiple blog posts just about Trotman’s presentation. The things I heard people say about it over lunch were remarkable.
Then, a non-panel-panel of the founding team of early smart-gossip blog Suck.com on one stage for the first time ever talked about how the sausage was made. I was proud to hear about a young Owen Thomas’s role there; Owen wasn’t here today because he’s rebuilding the blog my team and I built, ReadWrite. (Made me proud.)
Then Anil Dash pretended to be an egomaniac while actually shining light like an Olympian on women and people of color who have made the culture we live in.  “We’ve always been here,” I think he said, though Spike may have said that first. Dash showed off Makerba.se.

Zoey Quinn spoke about her lessons learned going from teenage depressed malleable jerk-face to the 2nd or 3rd worst-attacked target of the assholes of #GamerGate. She spoke about it from a game developer’s perspective, said anonymity is really important to protect and urged everyone to just be nicer! She was great.
Finally, CSS granddaddy Eric Meyer closed out the first day’s sessions with a simple nerd-for-good message:
The systems we design impact the things we do.  What we do online will appear normal to our children. System design is always social design. What kind of society do we want to design for?
That pretty much sums it up. I look forward to the evening’s events and tomorrow. 

I can’t imagine what could go further than today. Literally. 

Tonight I’m working on some thinking about future scenarios for my business, regarding a particular question (pricing).  I found myself thinking that there must be some good structured thinking tools for exploring questions like this in the foresight/futurist community.  Last week we made a big report on 125 top women futurists on the social web over at Little Bird.

I exported that report, grabbed all the home page URLs associated with these top futurist women, used them to populate a Google Custom Search engine and sure enough, found some awesome assets I could use. Quickly and easily.

Here’s that Search Engine: Women Futurists.  I thought I’d share it here, in the event that others are equally excited about leveraging the treasure trove of resources across all these wonderful websites.  I found this great page of resources for foresight exercises, for example.  But you could search for any topic and see what these people have written about it.  I love Custom Search Engines.  Bookmark and enjoy!

I’m watching futurist Gerd Leonhard‘s June 23rd 2015 talk in London titled Future of technology and-with-versus humanity: Future of Business (terrible audio quality, sorry) and something jumped out and caught my eye.  (Leonhard is one of the world’s most influential futurists, among top futurist peers like Andy Hines, Paul Higgins and John Smart.)

It was a statistic about the Automation of Knowledge Work, and it was on a slide referencing the May 2013 McKinsey Global Institute report titled Disruptive technologies: Advances that will transform life, business, and the global economy. There are 12 different types of technology discussed but automation of knowledge work is defined as “Intelligent software systems that can perform knowledge work tasks involving unstructured commands and subtle judgments.”

McKinsey said in 2013 that automation of knowledge work is going to have the one of the largest economic impacts around the world of any of the most disruptive technologies over the next 10 years, impacting the $9 trillion dollars that makes up 27% of global employment costs that go to knowledge workers.

Interestingly, at least as of 2 years ago, the hype-to-potential discrepancy that McKinsey saw was intense. Look at this chart:

That’s right, automation of knowledge work is expected to have one of the very highest economic impacts of all these disruptive technologies – but is the very-least discussed among general interest and business publications. What does that mean? I think it means “get in now,” for one thing.  High potential, low hype sounds like an opportunity for arbitrage against the future.

I bet if you redrew this chart two years later, for example, Internet of Things would have shot way up the Y-axis, as suddenly media and big companies have gotten very excited about it.   (For what it’s worth, I was writing extensively about IoT more than 5 years ago in 2010, this being my favorite post: an interview with Chetan Sharma about How 50 Billion Connected Devices Could Transform Brand Marketing & Everyday Life.)

As someone who’s at-root interested in building technology that automates knowledge work, I’m pretty interested to read McKinsey’s findings on its disruptive potential. (“This is not a market size,” the report emphasizes.)

That size of potential market to impact just below mobile internet and above (though they insist these aren’t rankings) cloud computing, robotics, and more. Higher total numbers are cited for the Internet of Things, which could impact $36 trillion in operating costs of healthcare, manufacturing and mining, and the $11 trillion in global manufacturing GDP that could be impacted by 3D printing.

McKinsey: “Advances in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural user interfaces (e.g., voice recognition) are making it possible to automate many knowledge worker tasks that have long been regarded as impossible or impractical for machines to perform. For instance, some computers can answer ‘unstructured’ questions (i.e., those posed in ordinary language, rather than precisely written as software queries), so employees or customers without specialized training can get information on their own. [Me: I’m especially interested in things like subjective judgement that used to be exclusively the domain of humans.] This opens up possibilities for sweeping change in how knowledge work is organized and performed. Sophisticated analytics tools can be used to augment the talents of highly skilled employees [Me: Now we’re talking! Let’s talk about things that weren’t even possible before!], and as more knowledge worker tasks can be done by machine, it is also possible that some types of jobs could become fully automated.”

Later, the report says: “Automated knowledge work tools will almost certainly extend the powers of many types of workers and help drive top-line improvements with innovations and better decision making.”

Again, as someone whose company is building technology used by enterprises for expert discovery, detection of emerging knowledge and related marketing opportunities, I’m excited about that.

But as a human being who is excited about building, hopefully sharing widely and personally experiencing augmented cognition, I’m even more excited.

PS. This reminds me of one of my favorite graphs around skills, from the OECD several years ago, demonstrating that the only skills that have grown instead of declined over the past 50 years are non-routine analytic and non-routine interactive. I don’t know how I feel about this politically, I certainly think that non-ambitious people most interested in doing routing work deserve to be able to support a family with dignity and freedom, not in poverty, but this is a pretty darned interesting graph.

“I want to meet that person face to face, in order to get an idea what their bandwidth is.” I’ll never forget the first time I heard someone say that about someone else in business.

As a first-time startup leader, I have a lot to learn. In order to do my ever-changing job as well as possible and learn at the same time, one of the (many) things I’ve been thinking about is expanding my personal bandwidth. Why? So I can avoid being overwhelmed, make fewer mistakes, catch problems earlier and be more effective. Among other benefits.

I’m a fan of James Altutcher’s How to Become an Idea Machine, where he challenges readers to come up with 10 ideas every day. “People say ideas are a dime a dozen and that execution is everything. Is this true?” he asks. “No. Ideas are a dime for 3. A dozen ideas are hard. Try it.”

So the other day, I made as my daily list of 10 ideas, “10 ways I could increase my personal bandwidth.” Specifically, I made that list in June and this weekend I’m going over my notes from June (I give each month its own Evernote file), and doing the Discern and Assimilate parts of how Chuck Frey says we learn: Gather info, Discern which of it is worth keeping, Assimilate it into our worldview and Use it.

The other thing I like is Scott Young’s Feynman Technique for learning. (If you visit that page, please forgive Young’s persistent hucksterism for his e-learning course. It’s really obnoxious but his free resources are really valuable if you can tolerate that.) The Feynman Technique is this: take something hard that you’re aiming to learn and present it out loud, like you’re trying to teach it. Pay particular attention to the relationship between parts. Do this without looking at your notes, until you need to. Note the places where your understanding fails you – because that’s what you’ve got still to learn. As an exercise, it’s effective. A good example of Active Recall, another part of what Young recommends.

It’s been 3 weeks now since I made my list of 10 Ways I Can Increase My Personal Bandwidth, and in reviewing my notes I’ve now talked through them out loud a couple of times. I thought I’d post them here too.

Tell me what you think. What preamble!

1. Read more, to reduce Unknown Unknowns. I’m reading The Essential Peter Drucker right now and learning about a bunch of questions in business that I had no knowledge of before. Drucker’s recommended answers to those questions are good – but being familiar with the questions alone feels like a big boost to bandwidth. One of the ways I’m making my online reading more efficient is to bookmark things in a to-read app, then send each link to a virtual assistant with a request to email me back the first paragraph and 3 bullet points with key facts or arguments from the article. I can scan 5 or 10 summaries pretty quickly each morning.
2. Learn from experience, including by taking notes. The definition of Learning, in one dictionary at least, is “the acquisition of knowledge or skills, through experience, study or being taught.” I love that. So much of it flows together in practice, too. So I try to take, and revisit, a lot of notes. One thing I’ve been trying to do more and more of is this: when I come up with a new or tricky question about how to do my job, I open up Evernote, type out the question and then just write out my gut-level working answer. Based on previous thinking, just spit it out. Then, I set a reminder on the doc (only available on mobile app? I can’t find it on desktop) to revisit the question in 1 week. A lot happens in a week, so I come back with fresh eyes and see if I still like the answer I put down. I very often do, which is encouraging in the “trust your gut” department. If appropriate, I edit the doc with more perspective or info. Then, I change the alert to come back in 30 days and then in 1 year. One year might be too long, but that’s what I’ve been doing so far.
3. Leverage mentors. I’ve got a number of friends or advisors who have been startup CEOs or business leaders otherwise and whose worldviews I really like. Talking with them is like an IV infusion of new thinking, experience and perspective. Except I look at it a little more critically than I might an IV. 🙂
4. Delegate.
5. Plan ahead. For myself and for those I would delegate to, the sooner you decide to turn the car, the less abrupt and disruptive the turn ends up being, right?
6. Business rules. Make decisions ahead of time, in the abstract, like if/then statements. Don’t re-invent the wheel or make every decision anew every time. I haven’t really done this one much.
7. Make fast decisions.
8. Make a list and pick 6. Ram Charan said in an HBR interview in 2013 that the best CEOs “take in a lot of information from many sources and then crystalize a point of view. They sort and sift the information and select the handful of factors that matter most – usually no more than six – from the myriad possibilities. That’s what they’ll base their decisions on. They cut through the complexity to get to the heart of the matter, without getting superficial. And they do it without losing sight of the customer.” I bought that issue of HBR at an airport, for $20, and read that on the plane. It’s been on my bookshelf for the past 2 years and I’m glad I was able to grab it to type it in here tonight. I’ve been using that method ever since, often to make really fast decisions when there is a lot of complexity at issue.
9. Pick your battles.
10. Prioritize.

Done! That’s 10.

Readers, what have you done to expand your personal bandwidth?

Here’s a great suggestion over on Twitter:

.@marshallk i would add, and @jaltucher would probably agree, make sure meditation is on the list. it's all about awareness

— gregorylent (@gregorylent) July 12, 2015