Pepper and strawberries

The World is changing, not through technology, but by how it changes our assumptions about how we can work.

I was at a small (but perfectly formed) event at the University of Surrey yesterday where two pundits (promoting their wares but graceful with it) told us that the future was (a) going to be filled with sensors giving us an avalanche of real time data that would enable us to make better decisions and (b) going to do so through mobile devices that could be made secure whilst enabling company workers to do what they needed to do out in the field.

They did a good job against their brief, but given the nature of the event and the presence of students as well as captains of industry (or, in my case, a mere lieutenant) the speakers didn't for me really get to the heart of the matter, which was: we know that technology will advance and will enable us all to do cool and groovy things - but that is much less important than knowing how we will manage, work and live with this technology. Because, sure as tech companies go bust or politicians lie, the real impact of technology is not what it does but how we live with it.

Tim Berners-Lee, the folks at ARPANET with email, Marc Andreesen and Netscape, Sergey, Larry and their chums at Google: they developed stuff to fit specific needs and gave them to the world - and the world took these things and took them places that no-one could have predicted. The only thing we can be sure about with new technology is that technology designed for users wins - and that users will do things with it that no-one has ever seen before.

This is especially true when technologies come together: when people make connections that were not there before. In the jargon, this is sometimes called mashing, but it's basic human nature to bring things together and try them out.

For example: most people, when they eat strawberries, are normally struck by one of two thoughts. The first is that they don't taste as good as they did when we were kids. The second is that what they need is a little sugar. What most people don't realise, of course, is that the best way to have strawberries taste like they used to taste (and avoid the perils posed by sugar) is to sprinkle your strawberries liberally with freshly ground black pepper. The pepper, bizarrely, has no effect but to make the strawberries taste like strawberries - only more so.

Honestly. Try it. You'll never look back.

The Law of of Unintended Consequences (or Chaos Theory, take your pick) demonstrates conclusively and continuously that we cannot predict with any certainty what is likely to happen. All we can do is hang on for the ride and look for places to sprinkle some metaphorical pepper on some unlikely strawberries.

In the future, the fun and games will be not around the technology (although some of it will be unbelievably sexy (like this, a year old but cool as heck...)) but around how we choose to live with it. Making choices, like...

...abandoning spending time on developing requirements and spending time just trying things out instead?

...not taking things away in black boxes to be presented to customers some months later only to find out it wasn't what they wanted - but developing it with your customer instead?

....accepting that we'll never communicate ideally with our people properly except by having conversations ?

...recognising that the avalanche of data that new technology offers us gives us unparalleled precision about less and less, but that aggregating that precision into something we can use means that, paradoxically, we must approximate meaning using analogies, stories, visual models, pictures and intuition - and that the next wave of technology must be about equipping us to understand better how best to extract rough-cut meaning at the decision level from diamond-sharp micro-data?

...or recognising that for companies to succeed in the future, they need ways of working and managing where most or all of what they do is managed, owned and delivered by other people - they may not own the data, the supply chain, the intellectual property or the service; they may only be a conduit that streamlines how customers get (to do) what they want?

In the future, success will come to those who try things out with real customers and have the mechanisms in place to adapt instantly to the feedback they give. It may look like the technologists own the future, but the technology will be owned by those who can run their businesses - and their lives - by involving customers, real time, and accommodating to them instantly as they show us where technology should go.

It's going to be a brave new world - and while I'm waiting, I'm going to pepper my strawberries.

- Mike