We clearly need to find ways to navigate ourselves back into some (new) order, to stabilize the chaos we are in, or beginning to feel we are finally moving out of the crisis and chaos of the last 18 months..
What we first need to do is make sense of what is going on around us.
Then, we need to determine what actions to take and the level of action, resource and support each part needs.
For this we need help, we need collaborators wanting to not just navigate back but more to navigate forward.
We are in a period of (great) change. How are we thinking about adjusting, not just to the immediate challenges but the greater ones that are certainly heading our way?
Within business, the present crisis offers a chance to make significant changes to how we operate in the future. However, I am not sure many of you feel the same; it seems disruption is in everything we need to undertake in what is coming towards us in change.
We are going to be challenged more today and in the future than ever before. To deconstruct and then reconstruct the Energy System is a massive complexity challenge. To switch from fossil fuels to energy generated by “clean” renewables is a daunting task.
Energy needs to “perform” as we “transform” it. That balancing needs significant collaboration and cooperations. No one company or country can undertake a change of this magnitude without undertaking the work-to-be-done with partners. This is not a time to sit on the side; it is a time to work together.
There is so much in need of disruption; we must learn not to fear it but embrace it differently.
Disruption actually has a common purpose, often far less sinister than promoted or we suspect, it requires us to re-equip and open up, as we learn to deal in this changing world where connections can emerge from anywhere at any time, offering a new ‘line of sight’ onto an existing problem to begin to break down the barriers and find new fresh ways forward. It calls for greater innovation and ingenuity, as we replace what might still work but is not a solution that is “fit-for-purpose today or tomorrow.
We need to utilize technology, digitalization, AI and machine learning with all the great human ingenuity. The ingenuity of the people at the centre of the design enables this more intelligent, rapid and lasting innovation that derives from applying all these tools and techniques at our disposal.
These will be through different approaches to designing and extracting the potential value gained. These, in my opinion, will form around ecosystems and their management through technology solutions provided by platform providers.
We need to respond quickly and in very different, highly collaborative ways. Digital offers unique, new ways to address many of our challenges everywhere. So our need is to explore and exploit, and we have to harness ourselves, our organizations, through these new technologies and collaborative concepts, to take advantage and leverage all that is possible.
Partnerships abound, not just within a specific industry but in cross-industry collaborations. Ecosystems need to form to take advantage of many rapidly emerging market opportunities. It is not just “welcome to a world of ecosystems“; it is learning to change from being exclusive owners into open collaborators that build ‘greater value’ from the common need of working together. Many of these are increasingly cross-industry ecosystems.
The combination of extracting synergies, of combining expertise, of seeing and recognizing common goals opens up greater possibility. Combining ecosystem thinking and innovation offers a very different proposition if we want to embrace a different world that shifts us away from simple consumption to better utilization, greater recycling, and saving the precious resources that the planet offers. We need new imaginative thinking, which comes from listening, collaborating and learning more from each other.
Just recognize the changes we are undertaking in cross-industry collaborations are significant.
If we recognize what it takes to build new transportation business models, it needs an ecosystem of public authorities, automakers, component suppliers, software providers and infrastructure builders to come together to make this happen.
Many of the changes that will emerge in the next twelve to twenty-four months will become more cross-industry and service ecosystems. In addition, collaborations are set to accelerate as we need to tackle growing issues that are greater in complexity, such as global warming, deprivation and moving and adjusting through a different crisis confronting us in the coming decades.
The search is for synergies, for economies, for speeding up solutions and scaling them in a connected global world. It requires a host (platform provider), different apps, weblinks and consistent ways to integrate these so those using the airport or train station can navigate their way around their personal needs. It needs an ecosystem and platform management to bring this together.
We have new ecosystems that are building new value in offering mobile commerce, building digital into all that we undertake increasingly in retail, banking, and entertainment. We see new energy solutions emerge in Agriculture, Energy, Utilities, Healthcare etc. etc. We see a ‘connected difference’ emerge in the Automotive and transportation by land, sea and air.
Services are changing as we can make greater connections. For example, our postal services offer us electronic transfers, blockchain transactions, purchasing most of our goods online, both in person and in business. We are looking to exploring concepts in Health solutions, Living, Where and how we work that require increasing cross-industry collaborations.
The connections we form are beginning to be reshaped by everything through the data; communications, public services, responses to crisis and opportunity. We want to become far more aware and alert. The smarter use of what we use to find out from our digital world gets increasingly channelled, as this increasing flow of data needs to be better analyzed, filtered, targeted, and coordinated in our lives to function at different levels of response.
This is a very different potential in the new business models for all involved. The period ahead will be a huge “reset” within ourselves, within the way we organize work. A world built on increasing collaboration, cross-industry cooperations with technology, digitalization, human resolve and innovation at its core.
We all need to learn to collaborate and not confront the world we are heading towards.
