A great question came up recently on whether building an exponential culture and the technology that we work with go hand-in-hand.
My answer: They absolutely do.
When we look at change, technology is a principal driver to change.
Look at how the horse got disrupted by the car, or how the gas lantern got disrupted by the light bulb and electricity.
Ultimately, technology acts as an enabler for change.
It’s an enabler for where things evolve to. But the problem is that people are terrified of this change.
Imagine that I have a horse and everyone wants me to buy a devil wagon (i.e. a car). We are in constant fear of this idea of change and whether it’s culture or technology, it all comes down to the principle of change.
And what drives this change is human ingenuity, human innovation, and more importantly, human curiosity.
It’s all about wanting to resolve and fix problems in a more efficient and valuable way.
Sure. I don’t think you’re going to find anyone disrupting the 2-minute noodle. It’s fine the way it is.
But the bottom line is that you want to change and improve how problems get solved – and technology is an enabler of that.
But change is a human issue.
We are the drivers of change, the embodiment of change, and our insight and understanding of how change works defines our relationship ultimately with technology.
Let’s look at Teraflow, as an example. Say you’ve just invested a lot of money into a server setup in your organisation, and now we come along and say, “No, that’s bad. Let’s put you into the cloud”.
You’re going to be sitting there in disagreement, because you’ve just spent this money. You don’t want to change. You want to be left alone.
As opposed to saying, “Wait a minute. Let’s look at that. You’ve got some really good insights here. What happens if we take this data and create a data lake in Google Cloud and start using predictive analysis to understand how people think and feel on that experience?”.
If you don’t change, you’re done for. You’re going to suffer. When it’s as simple as saying, “Wait a minute, let’s adapt and understand what change we need to go through.”
I don’t want to use the word digital disruption, because none of us really understand the word digital disruption. Everyone has a different interpretation, but it’s how we take technology and break it down into a way that we can actually make things work more efficiently and change the value that gets created.
And that’s really the core to being human.
There’s this symbiotic relationship and it really is a beautiful thing.
Just take a look at how technology has made our lives remarkably comfortable. Perhaps too comfortable, because we create these silly demands for what we expect from life as there are fewer and fewer challenges.
It really comes down to how we use this to help humanity thrive.
Which is ultimately the point of it all, isn’t it? To be even a small part of that process is incredibly valuable and extremely exciting.
