Tuesday, February 19, 2019

TECHNOLOGY AND THE CHANGING WORLD OF THINGS


What was it like the day after fire was discovered or the wheel was invented or the first gun was fired or the first printing press started rolling. Probably not any different than the day before, for the majority of the human race.

It took thousands of years between the first wheel’s creation in Mesopotamia and the widespread use of the wheels for carriages; It took more than 1500 years for gun powder to make its way from China to gain widespread use in Europe; It took 500 years between the invention of the printing press and its adoption in all world regions.

These and other inventions have change the course of human history, speeded up the process of human development and for better or worse have caused irreparable change when they have been widely adopted.

It is the greatest of understatements that the internet will pale in comparison, not only the scale of change it will engender but the speed with which this change will be adopted, so much so that in the next 10-, 20- or 50- years – not few centuries, when we look back we will not recognise the times we are living in now.

The first I heard of the internet is in the early 1980s that there was this computer network students off the east coast of Canada, on Prince Edward Island, would use to access libraries on mainland North America. That many people could read the same book at the same time. And they would read this in near real time – computing speed was much slower than, but still to my little mind at the time this was the stuff of science fiction.

While I grappled with this notion of clairvoyance then, my sons now, aged 10 and eight, would struggle to wrap their minds around the concept of a library as we knew it then, where one would go to a big room of books and borrow a maximum of three books for a week, to read at home. And that if someone had borrowed the book you wanted you would have to wait for them to return it before you could read it .

This difference in reality for these little boys – me three decades ago and my sons today,  is separated by more than time.

"It means for one, that with knowledge now so readily available, these kids can, will and do, know much, much more than we knew at their age; It means that their teachers are no longer the authority figures they used to be in our day, because today teachers standing in front of classroom may very well be spouting old news to a kid who has gone well past the bantu migrations or the rift valley formation or newton’s laws of physics in his random browsing of the internet at home....

It raises the age old dilemma that many have suffered with their richer parents, uncles or spouses, which is “What do you give a person for his birthday who has everything?”

Edgar Kasenene who started out as an IT engineer but now grapples with these questions in helping companies adopt for the new era argues that, “It’s not any more about facts but about creativity, what you can do with those facts, because facts have now been commoditized.”

In our day you would hear of a textbook that was the best for Geography, History or Mathematics and that there was only one copy of it and you didn’t have it. Facts were scarce. That is not an option now.

Everything we own or use is based on knowledge. If knowledge is now so prevalent it means the scarcity of things will soon be or is already in some instances non-existent.

So if there is no scarcity of information or knowledge leading to no scarcity of goods or services where does that leave economics, defined as the management of scarce resources?

Kasenene argues that the structures to manage our lives – at home, at work and in the world generally are designed to cope, manage or exploit scarcity. The status quo is redundant in a world where scarcity is not an issue.

Seen in this light, scarcity is a function of a lack of knowledge or ignorance.

So in my day (see how I refer to my day as if it is long gone? Because it is gone) having an education, speaking English or knowing how to do my tables was a competitive advantage. In this brave new world I have no competitive advantage of anyone with access to the internet, the winners are and will be those who can access this knowledge and creatively work with it to innovate and produce more.

"In workplaces all the manual jobs are or will be automated. Which makes one wonder whether factories will really bring jobs to economies like they did in the industrial age. That time is dead...

When we did field trips to the beer, soda and other factories in our younger days there were always people manning the lines, supervising processes and generally being around. Thankfully those same factories are still around. If you went there now there are not only fewer people on the factory floor but the output of these enterprises are multiples of what they were when their workforce was thrice or quadruple the size they are now. It is only going to get worse.

So what to do for us in working life staring into the abyss?

Kasenene says that career planning is out, things are changing so fast whole careers have been wiped out; Learning plans are in. That because of the speed of change we have to keep learning to remain relevant and not only a continued upgrade of our current skills but the acquisition  of other areas of knowledge and skills is imperative.

As is fast becoming evident these days, that no sooner have you learnt something – got your degree or master or PhD, than it becomes obsolete.

And finally this speaks to how we work in or run our companies.

The only way to continue to be relevant is to have an obsessive focus on the customers’ needs.  While management gurus like Tom Peters have been counselling this since the 1980s, it is now even more relevant. Because of the aforementioned explosion in information and options, the client does not need to stick with you – remember there is no scarcity and your competition can come from anywhere in the world from unrelated industries.

An innovation driven by evolving customer needs is the only way to remain relevant.
“Innovation is no longer a department it must become a way of life,” Kasenene said.

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