No, technology won’t transform your business
Technology cannot empathise with customers, innovate for new ones, or dream on its own accord, argues James Legge of customer experience agency GHO Sydney.
In January 2019, rock icon Nick Cave was asked if artificial intelligence could ever write a good song. “AI could write a good song, but not a great one,” he replied. “It lacks the nerve.”
A few months earlier, Harvard Business Review found that while digital transformation was still the number one concern of CEOs and senior execs in 2018, some US$900bn had been wasted.
Organisations are clearly scrambling to innovate, but instead of investing in people, they’re investing in technology. The problem? Technology can’t empathise with people or create new ideas. That’s the human task.
computer: hello. i've spent countless hours tracking your habits, tracking each thing you type and allegedly even tracking what you say out loud in order to sell you the perfect product. do you want like, a shaving razor or a subscription to soup?
— Mike F (@mikefossey) June 5, 2019
Technology isn’t a strategy
And a strategy isn’t a strategy if it doesn’t give you a competitive edge. Clients often profess a desire to pursue ‘digital transformation’ in order to beat their competitors, but they usually want to follow the exact same path as everyone else.
Digital technology has never been more accessible to businesses, and that’s great, but simply investing in the same tech as your competitor and hoping for the best is not going to cut it. To quote Syndrome (the eponymous villain from Pixar’s The Incredibles): “When everyone is super, no one will be.”
Technology can’t be creative
There is no doubting technology is important to business. But technology alone can’t make you stand out from the crowd. On its own, technology has no value or ideas; it’s what people do with it that gives it value.
To initiate creative thinking, it’s important to step away from technology and focus on the ideas themselves, ideas that can generate value for people and the business. Most importantly, any ideas need to be prototyped and validated with people, before technology enables you to scale them.
Contemporary methods for creative thinking like ‘frame innovation’, ‘design sprints’ and ‘lean startup’ enable organisations to be both creative and agile, and to rapidly turn uncertainty into opportunity.
Technology cannot empathise
To be relevant means to matter to someone or something, to understand the experiences, emotions, feelings and dreams that make up our lives.
That’s why it’s always best to conduct in-depth interviews rather than focus groups, and choose empathy-mapping over demographic studies. By giving a diverse set of voices a seat at the table, we can find the human solutions which can then be scaled by tech.
Technology won’t transform your business
Global investment in digital transformation will reach US$2tn by 2022. Those who are investing in it must know exactly why they’re using technology, and where the human element fits into the puzzle.
Technology has a role to play, but ultimately, it’s people who will make you great.
James Legge is executive strategy director at GHO Sydney
Glad to see you typed up the notes from our fishing skirmishes mate! 😉
There will be those that say “yet” in response to your primary suppositions. You can ignore them because you’re right; we are so far from being able to achieve what most LinkedIn ‘influencer’ headlines and conference key notes claim. People still matter most. Tech is just a tool. A helpful one, but it’s not a solution in and of itself.
Computers don’t do well with subjectivity. They are great at helping us avoid our subjectivity being a problem, but when you need subjectivity… It’s too ethereal for them. Anyone disagreeing, write a program (on your own budgets – not Google’s) with the subtle intricacies of your ‘brand tone of voice’ or ‘mission’ as a primary variable for consideration when generating output… Let me know how you go with that.
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Great article, if only more people would read and take this on-board. Having spent the last 30 years of my life in technology and IT, I get tired of the overselling of the technology marvel that will transform our business or lives. Sure there has been technology led transformation (the internet, mobility, eCommerce etc.) but all of these have required visionary business leaders (aka people) to make use to the new set of tools.
The primary issue I see is the point you make about technology being only a tool is not sexy and does not, in the eyes of the sales and marketing department, sell well to consumers. This leads to to what Gartner (in the aptly named ‘Hype Cycle’) calls the ‘Peak of Inflated Expectations’ which invariably leads to the ‘Trough of Disillusionment’ and very, very rarely to the ‘Slope of Enlightenment’ and finally the nirvana of the ‘Plateau of Productivity’.
The guilt does not all lie with the sales and marketing types either, Engineers and Technology professionals are notoriously bad at communicating or even understanding negative impacts of technology innovations – I am old enough to remember how the ‘Information Super-Highway’ was going to be the panacea to all that ails the human race, it would fix everything from greed and hunger to racism and exclusion – alas its just another place to sell more stuff.
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C’mon James. Don’t leave us in suspense.
So did Mike Fossey go for the shaving razor or the soup subscription/
Taking up on Nick Cave’s point, I can’t wait for the day when all the AI algorithms have been optimised to the picometre. Just imagine it … all the algorithms creating exactly the same perfect song. I’ll take Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ instead.
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