Resilience Over Efficiency by Futurist Gerd Leonhard, 29DEC2020

You know, I've been thinking a lot lately about what's happening with efficiency. It's funny, for a long time, as I was speaking to clients about the future and about the present, I always got this feedback about people wanting to have more optimization, more efficiency, you know, lower price points, better margin, and be better organized, and digital transformation to get to the point quicker, and so on and so on. But now, since the COVID crisis, the efficiency story is dead. The only story that matters today is the story of resilience, of agility, of empowerment, of collaboration. And efficiency is something that has kind of gone by the wayside. Of course it's important to be efficient, but now it's more like, can we switch? Can we pivot? Can we turn around on a dime? Can we get away from this obsession with better profit, better margins, and all that stuff that was there before? And now the story is much larger, also about purpose, because when you think about efficiency, it has little to do with purpose. It's like perfecting an ongoing story. It's making things work better than before, it's optimizing supply chain or all of those practical things. And those were and are of course, still very important. But now people are asking the question, are we doing the right thing? Should we have a different product? Should we try something else completely? And as you ponder that question, something happens. And a week later, another thing is in demand. And we can safely say that the next three months, starting right now, next three years, of course, are the period of utter volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. Vuca. We're going to live in a permanent vuca. I mean, even when the crisis is winding down, when there is a vaccine, this is a deep cut in our confidence, in our business models. And the narrative has changed. And the new narrative is not going to be about being quicker or faster or digital transformation. It's about human transformation, societal transformation. So as a headline, I think from the next couple of months, let's expect this really quite simply is going away from this idea of efficiency, optimization, productivity, and keeping that in the back pocket, so to speak, but moving towards being able to change. And resilience means also to have adversary things coming towards you, and you can find a way forward and navigate around it. And much of that has to do with not being a believer in just facts and data. But to look beyond that, it's interesting. You know, when you watch Jeff Bezos speak about data, he always said that if you come with a business idea to him, and you have to support it by data and focus Groups and facts and logic and how important that was or is to him. He always speaks about that. But then the other day, six months ago, I think it was a Business Insider event when he basically said, all the important decisions I make with guts and intuition and based on my heart, not on data. And he says both. And I think it's so true. When we look at resilience and agility and being able to pivot and to reinvent and to flip on the dime, those are personality issues, traits. They're things that we do because we can. They're not downloaded, and they're certainly not learned at business school. Can we learn efficiency, optimization and practical things like that? Yeah, we can learn that from others. We can look at case studies. But can we learn mental agility? Can we learn how to be able to instantly look at something and pull something out and come up with a different response? And we have to practice that. This is just like saying, well, emotional intelligence, same story. I mean, we can't download that from the App Store. We certainly can't just copy Jacinda Ardern's emotional intelligence, alleged emotional intelligence that I think she has. We can't just say, okay, we'll do the same thing. We can't. We have to find our own way into agility. We have to find our own way into resilience, and we have to practice it and we have to allow it. Because this is the other thing. Resilience and agility are the opposite of efficiency because they're by nature inefficient. I mean, if I'm looking to just execute well and just move on and take this execution and just make it perfect, that's one thing. That's like a spreadsheet. It's logical. And this is also, of course, what differentiates us from machines. We are not binary. We don't have to say, yes, no, yes, no. If this, then that. It's not like this for us. We're multinary. Machines are following the course of logic. And I think it will be for quite some time until we have maybe more Quantum computing, maybe 2050, the singularity, where machines cannot be binary. But this is, of course, what keeps back machines from being more. I wouldn't say human, but being really intelligent. Human intelligence is like, okay, it doesn't have to be yes or no. It can be yes, it depends, or yesterday, no, tomorrow. Or it can be a 0.73 or 1.47. It doesn't have to be zeros and ones. It's not binary. And we are certainly capable of ignoring facts, because we've already made up our mind and we shape the future like this. You know, we have foresight, intuition, and this is what makes us perfectly capable to drop efficiency as the primary concern and to think about reinvention, resilience, and agility to have an agile mindset. And on that note, I think it's really important that we think of agility as what I call the future mindset. That we always have one thought in the future, like what if? Or I've seen something that kind of sounds like it could very plausibly arrive. And I'm keeping this in the back of my mind. F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, the sign of intelligence is to keep two opposing ideas in your mind at the same time. And if we look at leaders around the world, especially in tech, this is what they're doing, starting with Steve Jobs and now Tim Cook, of course, and also Jeff Bezos and many others. This is what they do. So you have this today. You execute well. And that's really all about efficiency and optimization as well. But. But then the future, the future is not an efficiency story because it doesn't exist. And this is something that really, I think is also a big, big factor. Here in Europe, we tend to look at the future and say, well, we don't know the future, but we would like to see it proven. We would like to see a logical scientific approach to the future in the sense of this is a certainty, or it's very, very, very likely and it's about logic. It's not. The future is not about engineering. We can't engineer the future. The future will contain lots of engineering and production, but it's about imagination. I mean, let's follow the footsteps of Einstein who said imagination is more important than knowledge. And I would derive from that agility and resilience is probably more important than efficiency. So that's my lesson for now, and I hope you enjoyed it and I would look forward to your comments and also to input as to what the next session should be all about. Thanks very much for tuning in. This is Gert Leonard, Futures. Sam.