Transformation and the communications revolution

April 2nd, 2009

This is an edited speech that I gave in Paris which was part of the Nokia Siemens Transformation conference series.

Transformation, what is transformation? I asked, my response…

Transformation represents change and change is the means, by which the future enters our lives. It doesn’t knock or ring the doorbell. It simply, irrevocably arrives. Or as Alvin Toffler said the future is already here its just that its not very well distributed at the moment.

Transformation overturns old ways of doing things, it overturns old institutions and it creates new ones, and this is met with a great deal of resistance in the broadest sense of the word. As the old saying goes I embrace progress but I hate change, and one might add and nor can I comprehend it.

As a consequence of exploring transformation, I asked these 3 questions…

What role does technology play in the early 21st Century?
What drives technology usage?
What are the key principals to understand how to create customer value in the digital age?

People obsess about the technology, so its web/mobile 2.0 – 3.0 etc., But its not 2.0 anything – what is being created is a We Media for a We Species. All mobile/web technologies are designed around social interaction of one form or another. It’s a world of Social Media not Mass Media. Niche mass audiences – forming around passion based interests that are not geographic specific.

And why is that?

Because humans have an innate need to connect and communicate. And we have been denied this right in the mass consumer society, that demands that we are only good people if we consume and not create. That is why social networking, in all its forms are thriving. We witness this reflected in business, in education and in the sciences. People working together and collaborating together to achieve specific goals, and tasks. So whilst the technology is new and exciting – certainly for those who value the monetising bit – it’s really showing an underlying truth about who we are. And that truth changes everything.

The technology of man

And new technologies do not come out of nowhere. As both William Powers, and Carlota Perez argue. They are indeed human creations in the first place and they succeed, or not, to the extent that they meet human needs. In other words, as much as communications media influence the way people of a particular time and place live, the reverse is also true: People have tremendous influence over how technologies evolve.

Perez points out that at a certain point in a technology life cycle, we the people take that technology and direct it towards very specific goals and purposes, like the tools of web 2.0 and its moniker social media. Marshall McLuhan argues in the Gutenberg Galaxy that technologies are not simply inventions which people employ but are the means by which people are re-invented.

The invention of movable type was the decisive moment in the process of re-invention from feudal man to reformation man. Of course you may be familiar with the term User-Generated Content. However Co-creation goes way beyond this simplistic view of something far more powerful and complex. People embrace what they create. What does this mean for brands and business? It means that by engaging our customers in your business – more relevant solutions can be created that your most passionate customers can believe in and advocate.

And if Gutenberg’s technology freed the word and gave it to society,, so that man and woman could for the first time make their way in the world – this revolution is about technologies of co-operation – such as Ushahidi, a platform that crowdsources crisis information…

Or Noteflight, that enables people to collaborate and co-create music, by scoring the music as a collective effort

Or indeed Threadless, a business whose success demonstrates what happens when you allow your company to become what your customers want it to be. Threadless succeeds by asking more than any modern retail company has ever asked of its customers — to design the products, to serve as the sales force, to become the employees.Threadless made $30m in 2008. And only 5% of the people who bought stuff from threadless did not get involved with the community in one form or another.

My conclusions:

Telecoms and mobile telecoms has been caught in the transition from the industrial analogue world to the networked society. Its not your fault. The industrial and mass consumer ideology is built upon the scale of production and the scale of consumption. And mobile telecoms has built itself behaving in the same way.

But that in fact is not how we communicate, or connect as people.

What if you were to think about your subscriber base as a network of networks that are distributed either hyper locally or super globally. And, rather than trying to guess how you might make money, why not give the tools to people to create what they truly need and watch a new ecology evolve as a consequence. Returning to the thoughts around : discovery, search and VRM I wonder if we should offer tools for collaboration to generate commerce, entertainment and knowledge and information exchange – that is how real markets thrive.

And reap the benefits of being the facilitators as…