Many times over my career so far, I’ve opted to work in roles ‘on the edge’, often between established business units or sectors. Serving as a bridge or interface between them. Collaborating and sharing ideas from one context into others. And/or building new functions to galvanise change. Through experience, I’ve honed skills in identifying what inherent assumptions are being made by different parties and where interaction has broken down. In fact, silos in businesses originally develop for good reasons: the given area needs to become more specialised to extract greater value and efficiency, putting in place more procedures, governance and structure to do so. Over time though, it ringfences itself too much, atrophying in place and unable to adapt to changes around it... 

In this article, I explore how established organisations can change successfully, and the stages a new ‘initiative’ or function goes through as it becomes a greater part of how the business operates. Driving adoption of new technologies or approaches across a business (and/or industry) are examples: too early and the sparkle could fizzle out, too late and you’re left far behind. Becoming data-driven or digital-first, say. Another is product development, introducing new solutions (perhaps backed by new organisational capabilities built or bought) to lead the business into the future. 

Successful collaboration requires that we know enough about each of the disparate worlds to build trust with all of them, encouraging them to look up and outwards in pursuit of new opportunities, to make decisions, and to take sustainable action. Helpful skills to galvanise change include: an ability to connect the dots plus technical depth in one or more areas for credibility, communication, relationship building to cooperate across functions, and critical thinking (especially matching a possible solution with a business problem). At a team-level, you want a multi-skilled group, experts from different domains working together with innovation drivers familiar with design thinking and agile methods. 

A significant part of change in a business is about bringing the people along: evangelising a new direction, shifting mindsets, promoting adoption of the new approach/product/service/technology, hosting training & demos… And, these days, a meaningful proportion of my work involves these ‘change management’, ‘transformation’ and modernisation elements. Many people naturally have anxiety about how changes might affect their own careers, and the effort involved in upskilling themselves. I very much believe human intelligence will continue to be needed (in addition to the automation and speed that artificial intelligence can bring) in order to ask questions, identify problems, think of possible answers – perhaps some not encountered before – and create solutions. The visibility of an ‘innovation’ team, and its ongoing business achievements, is crucial to winning hearts and minds. 

The affected people should be part of the process of proposing new ideas – great ones can come from enhancing existing processes as well as exploring emerging technologies and experimenting. And, it’s not really surprising too that an innovation process shares strong similarities with a product development lifecycle: aspects such as concept, feasibility, exploration, experiment, design, pilot, build, pricing, signoff, launch, ongoing management… Many processes include go / no-go gates too where ideas are shelved to focus resources on more promising ones. 

I’ve seen these thoughts play out in different contexts, such as pricing & product development, financial reporting, investment management, and data science & analytics functions. It’s true that change may be prompted by different drivers (regulations, competitors, technology and more…), however, the organisation needs to evolve new ways of working, perhaps new departments or operating models, to respond. Read more to follow along as I unpack how the functions evolve over time / the different phases organisations go through, from early activity to intermediate to advanced, by which stage it becomes business as usual.

​At Protagion, we recognise the incredible power of analytics and automation, while at the same time believing wholeheartedly in our uniquely human abilities. As we’ve argued before, it is the blend of these powers (man and machine) that creates immense value. In this article we discuss and share a TED talk by an executive from the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) on “human plus AI” approaches.

Some of our previous articles which touch on similar themes are:

• Jobs of the Future where we explore Cognizant’s thoughts on roles that suit as as humans in future, particularly because as consumers we want the human touch: (i) coaching roles where we help others get better at, for example, managing their finances, (ii) caring roles where we improve others’ health and wellness, and (iii) connecting roles where we interface between man and machine or link the physical and virtual, adding human imagination and ingenuity to what machines do well
• Celebrating our Humanness in which we discuss the psychology underlying our vulnerability and resistance to change, and how to use it to encourage people to explore what could be, instead of clinging to what is; it also references our skills which are uniquely human like empathy, compassion, creativity, strategic thinking, communication and collaboration / teamwork
• Active Career Management: Embracing New Technologies where we share techniques for staying abreast of the changing technological landscape, recognising the importance of keeping up-to-date and taking inspiration from change

In fact, Protagion’s business and approach to managing our careers actively is built around the concept of combining human experience, expertise and judgement (from our mentors and coaches) with the benefits offered by technology, algorithms and analytics to offer personalised career suggestions that evolve as professionals grow.

Read more to uncover the ideas of Sylvain Duranton, a business technologist and leader of BCG Gamma, which has deployed over 100 customised AI and analytics solutions for large companies around the world. His team conceptualises, builds, and deploys data science and advanced analytic solutions. Sylvain joined BCG in 1993, and as you will discover, he is a fan of “human plus AI” approaches. He says artificial intelligence is impacting a variety of fields, including businesses’ relationships with their customers, their industrial operations, risk assessment and management (in areas such as healthcare, finance and insurance), and improving the supply chain. However, he warns against “algocracy” (rules-based decisions without human oversight). We conclude the article with a video of his roughly 14-minute talk, given in Mumbai.

​With the new decade well & truly underway, I’ve been thinking about the future, and wanted to share some helpful techniques with you. These techniques can enable us to extend the range of our thoughts, supporting us to take a longer-term perspective and imagine possible futures. 

The future is itself an idea: we conjure it in our imaginations. We are better than other species at making this imaginative leap, and it is the reason we have civilisations, have landed on the moon, plant trees for future shade, and have built cathedrals across centuries, for posterity. 

​However, we’re also by nature impulsive and reactive... The short-term vs long-term tension is part of who we are, and balancing it appropriately is important. For example, this tension arises in the healthcare and financial services industries when encouraging people to look after their health. We’d mostly prefer to eat treats and relax on the couch, but doing this consistently is bad for us, so well-designed incentives (such as shared value models in an insurance context) can encourage us to make good choices now (like moderation and exercise) that lead to future health benefits.

This article is inspired by the work of Bina Venkatamaran, a former journalist and policy advisor who teaches at MIT, and Ari Wallach, a futurist. Both of them gave separate TED talks, and we also reference Bina’s book* and Ari’s essay in Wired magazine where he calls for a “visionary yet goal-oriented” framework for long-term strategy that “can help leaders navigate the balance between short-term gain and long-term ruin. A CEO might say: ‘That may be good for the bottom line, but it poses significant risks to our longpath’.”

It’s also about how we choose to measure our success, and the meaning of our lives. In Bina’s words: “Do we measure ourselves by the moment, by what’s happening in this immediate moment, or do we measure ourselves by what we’re doing towards the longer endeavour of both what we’re doing in this life and how we’ll be remembered?”

Read more to explore Bina and Ari’s ideas, examine our preference for immediate gratification and the mistakes we naturally make, consider our unique capacity for mental time travel, contrast prediction and forecasting against judgement and foresight, discover different tools and techniques for thinking ahead, and watch Bina’s TED talk. It’s particularly fitting too that 2020 is synonymous with perfect vision – I hope that these tools will help us all to envisage our ultimate aims more clearly.