FOUR WAYS FUSE CAN DRIVE BUSINESS SUCCESS

As we look towards a brand-new year here at Fuse we would like to take a moment to reflect upon who we are and what we do best as a company, for as a certain Socrates once said: “To know thyself is the beginning of wisdom.”

At Fuse, we have long believed that to design and deliver experiences that customers and employees really want and value, it is imperative that we not only understand them, but understand how those experiences actually fit into their daily lives. This goes to the heart of what we do as an organisation. We maintain that it is not enough to simply understand people, rather, we must strive to understand how people make a home for themselves in a fast-changing and increasingly complex world. For although our world may be shifting, the things that unite us, the things that make us human – our needs, wants, and desires – remain the same. In this post, I touch upon the four ways that we at Fuse apply our uniquely human-centred approach to addressing these human needs in order to create business impact: identifying new opportunities; building customer and employee experiences; establishing customer-centric workforces; and anticipating credible futures. Let’s take a look at each of these in more detail.

IDENTIFYING NEW OPPORTUNITIES

Identifying new business opportunities is at the core of what we do as a company. Without opportunity, there is no innovation, and without innovation, there is no progress. From our many years in the field, we have found that most opportunities are actually disguised as problems, at least at first. Once we dig a bit deeper however, we find that hiding underneath this seeming obstacle is an opportunity area waiting to be brought to light. We help businesses uncover needs that they cannot currently see and earn them a valued role in their customers lives. Through our uniquely human-centred approach combining social science with experience design and business thinking, we help our clients uncover and explore new opportunity spaces and get separation from their competitors. As a tangible example of this process, we helped kick-start a global semiconductor manufacturer’s data monetisation strategy for wearables. By combining qualitative research, data analysis, and value proposition design, we identified a competitive new data strategy that steered them towards a five-year roadmap to success.

BUILDING CUSTOMER AND EMPLOYEE EXPERIENCES

The philosopher of science Karl Popper once said of experiences: “We do not stumble upon our experiences, nor do we let them flow over us like a stream. Rather, we have to be active: we have to ‘make’ our experiences.” Since our very first days at Fuse, we have helped our customers build experiences based on a deep understanding of people. We recognise that experiences matter. Experiences don’t just deliver functional needs but create positive emotional impact and meaning. Where once goods and services held sway as the main mode of consumption, now experiences and emotion have emerged as key channels through which businesses can create value. Through our deep ethnographic research experience and customer-centricity we help our clients build experiences that are not only unforgettable, but relevant, timely, and delightful. The car buying experience is a case in point. Our client, a North American automobile manufacturer was struggling with low customer experience ratings and lacked understanding of its end-customer’s complete purchasing journey. Through in-depth interviews and dealership visits in three different U.S. markets, we reimagined the car buying experience to produce a strategy to improve the overall customer experience, align activities of manufacturer and dealers, and supported them in the creation of a new role tasked with “owning” the full customer journey.

ESTABLISHING CUSTOMER-CENTRIC WORKFORCES

To have sustained success in the new economy requires above all else, putting the customer at the centre of the equation. At Fuse we help to raise awareness and prepare workforces for a customer-centric mindset through establishing a common understanding within teams. To do this, we provide them the tools and metrics to build empathy and insights generation to create a relentless focus on their customers’ needs. We help companies create true growth, not just short-term gains, in order to prepare them for whatever the future holds. As an example of this work, our client – a medium-sized parts manufacturer in heavy industry – wanted to strengthen their competitive position and rethink their approach to innovation. In particular, they wanted to complement their advanced tech capabilities with increased user empathy to consistently create industry-leading solutions. Through an assessment of the organisations’ processes and systems, we helped them to create processes to identify the unmet needs of mining and construction workers and build creative solutions to address them.

ANTICIPATING CREDIBLE FUTURES

In a fast-changing and unpredictable world, understanding and analysing emerging shifts in order to anticipate credible futures has become increasingly important. At Fuse we help businesses navigate these shifts so that they may better position themselves to face the challenges ahead. However, picking up on the early signs of these emerging movements requires a culturally sensitive and human-centric approach. Through deep analysis of the social, technological, economic, and political we help inform our clients of what lies ahead. We provide the light that helps our clients chart and navigate the disruptions of tomorrow. The world is without doubt currently undergoing major changes in the way societies are organised. How will key factors (e.g. mobility, structure of work, housing, mental illness) impact the future of urban environments? Our client, a global technology and infrastructure company, wanted to identify the shifts that will define how European cities will evolve in the near future, and create scenarios of what they may look like in 2030. We interviewed over twenty-five topic experts and analysed industry reports and white papers to surface the most relevant shifts impacting urban living. Through ‘anticipatory thinking’, we fleshed-out the evolution of the most relevant shifts and potential obstacles over time to help them better collaborate with their partners and clients.

KNOWING FOR BUSINESS SUCCESS

 I began this piece by reflecting upon the words of a certain classical Greek philosopher. But what does it actually mean to “know thyself”?

At Fuse we are keenly aware of how much more complex the world has become. Technology is advancing at such a rate that social conventions are struggling to keep pace. We are in a constant game of catch-up. Little wonder then that most people don’t take the time for self-reflection. Only by understanding oneself however, can we understand others.

We believe that one of the most effective ways of discovering who we are – our strengths as well as our weaknesses – is through the eyes of others. This is the crux of what we do at Fuse. We help businesses know themselves better through our expert outsider eyes so that they may truly flourish. We can only do this however by knowing who we are and what we stand for. In 2019, we aim to strive more than ever to listen, to learn, to examine our values and reflect back upon our choices. Let’s start the New Year together by getting to know ourselves better.

DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION TO CREATE A FUTURE-PROOF ORGANISATION

Search for “Age of Disruption” on Google and you’ll get over 74 million results.

We live in an era of transformative change. New developments in technology are coming in at a speed never experienced before. Artificial intelligence, robotics, blockchain, connected devices are just examples of technologies with the potential to disrupt entire industries. Often referenced as the Fourth Industrial Revolution, this latest wave of technology breakthroughs has enabled the emergence of completely new ways of delivering products and services. 

As direct consequence, customers’ expectations are changing. Customers demand more from businesses: from on-demand, personalised services to seamless experiences across channels. At the same time, competition is increasing significantly. Nowadays, the littlefish can eat the big one, no matter where it comes from – and this is the new “businessas usual”.  This shifting context is creating great pressure on companies to change the way they create and deliver value to stay competitive in the market.

BUT HOW DO ORGANISATIONS TYPICALLY RESPOND TO THIS PRESSURE AND NEW REALITY?

We see two emergent organisational needs and consequent approaches:

Need for digital transformation – Through the digitisation of internal tools and processes, organisations try to increase efficiencies, accuracy and reduce internal costs. 

Need for agile culture – Through the adoption of methods and processes such as lean, scrum, agile, or design sprints, organisations try to become more entrepreneurial, innovative, decrease time-to-market and avoid the risks of sinking time and money into products or services that people don’t want.

As much as we recognise the good intentions behind these approaches, we see a big missed opportunity here. By oversimplifying digital transformation tomean digital tools and agile culture to mean new methodologies, companies fail to put these initiatives into the bigger framework of the need for business transformation in order to be able to respond competitively to today’s changed reality.

At Fuse, we believe that by looking at these two priorities as two connected parts of the same whole, you create a virtuous cycle that leads towards the future-proof organisation you want to be — not just delivering bottom line ROI, but also top-line growth and unexpected new potential.

KILLING TWO BIRDS WITH ONE STONE

So how do you create this virtuous cycle to unlock the full potential of your efforts and reach your organisation’s vision and strategic goals? We believe that, to succeed, business transformation requires alignment of multiple organisational factors: strategy, people and culture. Only once alignment across these three elements is found, organisations are in a position to identify the best enablers for change – be them new IT tools or innovation methods. 

FIND ALIGNMENT BETWEEN STRATEGY, PEOPLE AND CULTURE…

…THEN IDENTIFY THE ENABLERS TO GET YOU WHERE YOU WANT TO BE

To do so, there are few considerations we think companies should make:

Strategy 

Where are you now and where do you want to be at a specific time? How can you get there? How can digital transformation and more agile ways of working help you in the process? How do you best manage the change across the organisation? 

People

Where do your employees, partners and clients stand now? What are their motivations, needs, challenges but also level of commitment to the brand and trust in management? How prepared are they for the change to come? How can you better engage them throughout the process? How would you like them to behave in the transition? How can you unlock their full potential and empower them to become leaders?

Culture

What are your current values, beliefs and ways of working? What is core to your DNAthat should be kept, and what are bad habits you need to shed? What are behaviours and mindsets that the transformation should enable? How should groups and the company as a whole operate? Ultimately, how do you create an environment that amplifies the ability to collaborate on shared business goals? 

Enablers

What are the (digital) tools, (agile) methods and processes that will help you achieve your goals faster and better? What does this mean for your organisation today? How do you guarantee all efforts are geared to becoming a future-proof and competitive organisation? 

These are the questions we believe organisations should ask themselves to ensure that the business transformation journey they are about to begin has clear objectives and direction (strategy), fits within the true nature of their organisation (people and culture), and all activities and investments (enablers) are optimised for this well-defined change. 

By looking at agile and digital not as ends unto themselves, but as enablers of a necessary business transformation, companies can define clear goals to stay relevant in a constantly changing world, and identify which initiatives will help your strategy, your culture and your people to achieve transformational goals better and faster.  Putting people in the centre of these efforts ensures that you understand what they need, how they can contribute, how to gain their buy in to significant organisational change, and that you also meet the baseline benefits of efficiencies, reduced time to market, and higher responsiveness to external shifts.

If this topic is important to your company right now, or if you would like to know more about our programmatic approach to preparing organisations for the future, please contact us.

THE REAL VALUE OF DIGITAL ASSISTANTS ISN’T AUTOMATION – IT’S AUGMENTATION

The conversation around digital assistants tends to gravitate around automation (AI bots doing the things we don’t want to do). Yet, at Fuse we believe the real value will come from augmentation: digital coaches rather than digital butlers.

SORRY, WHO’S CALLING AGAIN?

The highlight of the last Google IO conference was the unveiling of Google Duplex, Google’s AI powered voice digital assistant.

In the demo, a woman calls a hair salon to make an appointment. After some back and forth small talk, she gets to the point and works out the best time for her hair appointment. If you haven’t watched the demo you should – you will see that it’s basically impossible to know that the woman calling is not human.

Last month, Google Duplex was rolled out as part of Google Assistant in 43 US states [1]. What was a futuristic innovation less than a year ago is now readily available to anyone with an Android phone. Yet Google Duplex isn’t particularly intelligent – its function is limited to the dull and admittedly simple task of making reservations [2].

So why the commotion? People’s bewilderment wasn’t about what Google Duplex did (make a reservation). It was about how it did it (brilliantly mimicking a human conversation – to the point it became impossible to know it is not “me” making the call).

This, in turn, highlights a number of fundamental questions: what is the relationship between Google Duplex and its “owner”? Is Google Duplex an external agent acting on our behalf – a kind of butler? Or is it rather a digital extension of ourselves? Who, in this instance, is actually making the reservation?

This question, while benign when the assistant’s role is limited to making an appointment, dramatically grows in significance once we start imagining what this new type of entity will soon be able to accomplish.

THE ADVENT OF THE DIGITAL SELVES

Everything we do today leaves a digital trace: meetings we set, emails we send, payments we make, content we consume, strings of text we tweet, pictures we post… the list goes on.

If Google Duplex can mine an agenda to find the best time to book an appointment, it takes little effort to imagine what it could do if it harnessed the whole trove of data in one’s Google ecosystem (agenda, email, payments, maps, searches, etc.).

Arguably, given the exponential growth of both the amount of data people produce and the ability of AIs to make sense of it, very soon this new type of digital assistant will be able to provide incredibly pertinent advice and recommendations with such accuracy, that people will happily let them act directly on their behalf.

To organise the countless applications of these Digital Selves, we can rank them on a continuum that ranges from automation (taking over tasks people don’t want to do – that’s the Google Duplex use case) to augmentation (enabling people to be better at what they do).

From one end of the spectrum to the other they will, amongst other things: organise your agenda, pay your bills, buy groceries, pick the best mobile or internet plans, suggest entertainment and leisure activities, plan your holidays, organise your finances, prepare you before meetings, coach you to gain new skills, suggest your next career move, and maybe even give you insights on your emotional wellbeing.

While the conversation on AI tends to gravitate towards automation, the tasks that can be automated are by definition those with the lower added value. This is why we believe the real transformation will actually come from augmentation [3].

If Google Duplex is a butler, we see the Digital Self as a coach: an entity that helps you know yourself better and gives you advice on how to be more efficient, how to grow, how to become a better version of yourself. In the words of Michael Schrage, research fellow at the MIT: “I want people to also think of AI as Augmented Introspection”.

AUGMENTATION IN THE CONTEXT OF THE WORKPLACE

While this will impact all aspects of people’s daily life, it foremost has the potential to completely transform the workplace. What happens when each employee has a ubiquitous personal coach, advising them on the best way to be more productive, more efficient, more sociable, or more creative? What is the impact on individuals, teams and organisations? More pressingly, what can your organisation do today to prepare for the advent of this new paradigm?

We will further explore these questions in a follow-up article which draws from our conversation with Michael Schrage, expert on the topic and research fellow at the MIT Sloan School’s Centre for Digital Business.

WE CAN HELP

If you are interested in understanding how to best leverage artificial intelligence to augment human intelligence in the context of the workplace, contact us.

REFERENCES

[1] https://venturebeat.com/2019/03/06/google-duplex-rolls-out-to-pixel-phones-in-43-states/

[2] https://ai.googleblog.com/2018/05/duplex-ai-system-for-natural-conversation.html

[3] Of course, designing and developing solutions that can do a specific task instead of humans (i.e. automation) is relatively easy. As the solution is fairly self-contained, you have to conceive only a limited number of fairly simple human-machine interactions. On the contrary, designing a solution that provides inputs to people so they can do something better (i.e. augmentation) is incredibly more complex. At minimum it requires: (i) a fine understanding of the process at play (what are the different sub routines the human has to follow), (ii) a way to evaluate the outcomes of the overall process, (iii) knowledge that once transmitted to the human would allow him to be more efficient, or increase the quality of its output, (iv) an interface that would allow the human to take into account the solutions’ inputs without disrupting his workflow.

[4] Image from the promotional material of the movie Computer Chess, http://www.computerchessmovie.com/

THE CHANGING ROLE OF BRANDS IN A LONG-TAIL WORLD

HOW RELEVANT ARE BRANDS TODAY?

In the past, brands have generally fulfilled two main functions: 1. as proxies for quality – simply put, people need brands to help them identify which products are of fair quality only as long as they have no better way to do it; and 2. as identity building blocks – shared signs used to express one’s identity with peers in a language everyone understood.

With the advent of digitalisation however, these functions are largely becoming irrelevant.

In a recent global research project we conducted on the attitudes and behaviours of digital natives, our research showed that people are now building their identity as much online as offline, they can draw from an endless pool of meaning-rich signs to express who they are. Better yet, they can create multi-media content to precisely paint the persona they aspire to be and effortlessly broadcast it to the world.

Brands are still one of the signs they can use to tell that story. But they can also reveal it through existing content (one of the stickiest Spotify features is the constant social broadcasting of people’s playlist), capturing their life in pictures or videos (e.g. me and my wife eating at this delicious yet not too formal Korean BBQ joint), or even directly stating their opinions or preferences (causes, surveys, likes, status, etc.).

Brands arguably used to be the main type of social identity building block. Now, they are just one of many. They are shifting from being the most to the least efficient way to create and broadcast one’s identity.

Ironically, branding experts understood that shift long ago. As brands are created meaning-poor, marketers try to enrich them with content – what they call “brand content strategies”. Yet if brands require content, content doesn’t need brands, leaving brand strategists to fight an uphill battle.

BRANDS MADE SENSE IN A MASS-MARKET WORLD, LESS SO IN A LONG-TAIL ONE

This conjunction of factors is conspiring to retire the brand as the most practical unit to simplify people’s lives. Brands – whether as proxies for quality or as bricks to build identity – are just not precise enough any longer.

The people we spoke to during our research came back to the idea that the product or offer – not the brand – was the unit that made sense to guide their choices. They go online, check and compare reviews, and ultimately decide if a specific product or offer is good for them.

Relatedly, we asked tens of digital natives what their favourite brands were. Of the few who did name a brand (most did not), only three named a clothing brand: Nike, Adidas (both for functional attributes: comfort and durability) and Gucci. Brands just did not seem very relevant for them to build identity.

In contrast, virtually all the digital natives we spoke to were using digital content (which they sometimes created themselves and sometimes borrowed) to build and express their identity.

PEOPLE NOW FULLY EXPECT COMPANIES TO ADAPT TO THEIR UNIQUE NEEDS

Underpinning the rejection of brands is peoples’ increasing self-confidence and the belief that they are able to: evaluate if something is good for them, based on unique, endogenous criteria; and precisely define their identity using a vast range of signifiers, including content they created themselves.

In a self-reinforcing loop, this belief is fuelled – and fuels – the hyper-personalisation that characterises the current business world. As companies are able to target individuals with relevant offers, people are increasingly expecting products and offers to be relevant to their unique and contextual needs.

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR BRANDS MOVING FORWARD?

The fundamental needs once fulfilled by brands will not vanish. People still require the convenience to know what product works for them, and ways to express their social identity. Yet as the power dynamics between companies and people shifts, executives need to recognise that people are increasingly demanding and sophisticated customers.

Rather than the end of brands, our insights point to the need for companies to rethink how they can help people by:

• Simplifying their choices without disempowering them

• Building and projecting their identity through a rich, precise and convenient language

If the early signs we witnessed are revealing an emerging trend, then we could be looking at a major disruption ahead.

If this topic is important for your company, or you would like to know more about our insights and perspective on the future of branding and GenZ, please contact us at: hello@fuseforesight.com

DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION: PUTTING PEOPLE AT THE HEART OF YOUR BUSINESS OUTCOMES

That title sounds embarrassingly obvious. So why is this not the strategic framing of every digital transformation project? We believe that the impact of your employees’ work — innovative new products, satisfying customer experiences, increased sales and profits — is intrinsically linked to how they experience work. You don’t get better at what you do if each step along the way is a gruelling struggle. Digital transformation can help you unlock people’s best potential while creating significant value for your company. For this to happen, your transformation must start by focusing on people.

Your people are not only your employees, but also your partners and customers. In this post I focus on how to make the people inside your company receive real benefit from your efforts.

UNDERSTANDING EMPLOYEES TO UNLOCK THEIR POTENTIAL

Employees inside your company are a collection of unique individuals, all with their own motivations, goals and preferred ways of thinking and acting. You need to recognise these myriad realities within your walls and embrace them to unlock the potential of creativity, critical thinking, leadership and autonomy — the core human assets companies need to cultivate today. And as executors of the strategy in the day-to-day, employees are the real catalysts for change, hence they should become co-creators in the transformation

CULTURE, THE MOST CHALLENGING OBSTACLE

As I discussed in my previous article, the most challenging aspect of most digital transformation initiatives is finding alignment or moving the culture to where you need it to be to successfully implement it. Over half of all digital transformation initiatives fail to deliver expected ROI due to cultural issues that include having no clear organisational objectives or understanding of how people think, act and collaborate; not engaging with people throughout the process from needs identification, to getting onboard with the value of these efforts, to piloting early experiments, to evangelising the shift.

These missteps often result in a paint-by-numbers approach that is not designed for your company’s needs and sadly prioritise the wrong digital tools and processes. All of these cultural obstacles arise due to lack of upfront recognition of who you are designing this transformation for, how new processes and tools need to work to fit their real constraints and routines, and why the company is undertaking this huge effort in the first place.

ALIGN EMPLOYEES’ NEEDS WITH ORGANISATION’S BUSINESS OBJECTIVES

At its core, business culture consists of the values, beliefs and norms that a group of people share to achieve specific goals together. Culture is not only articulated top-down through official processes, policies and rules. It is also expressed through bottom-upsharing of best practices learned within the working environment — the kind of habits and unspoken models of action that spread organically inside a company.

A successful digital transformation plan must recognise and incorporate both the individuals’ needs and the company’s business objectives. The key concerns of individuals will be how prepared they are to perform in this new environment, how they will create value using the proposed tools and processes, and how they will be acknowledged for the value they bring. From the organisation’s perspective, the key concerns will be how to equip employees with tools and knowledge that will enable them to make positive measurable impact for the company.

Failing to embrace all of this is setting yourself up for failure. Digital tools and processes need to be adapted to your people, not the other way around. Don’t think in terms of technologies and compliance standards; think about how you can better enable people to achieve their goals and at the same time unleash their creativity to experiment and create true impact throughout the organisation.

Elevating transformation efforts to being truly people-centred will create more value faster. Here are five aspects to consider when transforming people’s work:

1. Acknowledge that change is difficult. It’s difficult for organisations, and it’s difficult for individuals. Changing everything at the same time won’t work. Intentional, sequenced change that creates measurable wins for everyone to build upon is necessary.

2. Segment and prioritise the users of new digital tools and processes. How does it benefit them as individuals? How does it benefit the business? How do the two sides of this equation fit together?

3. Understand the human and cultural contexts that these changes must work within.What routines, working conditions, and embedded cultural beliefs will impact whether or not intended benefits will actually be delivered?

4. Collaborate with your workforce throughout the process. What can you learn from employees to scope and sequence your efforts? How can they contribute to creating use cases and testing pilots? Who can be key evangelists to create demand for these new tools across the workforce?

5. Create measures of performance. During design, how can you create hypotheses of the best qualitative and quantitative measures of success? During pilots, can you challenge those measures to make sure they are as specific and meaningful as possible? How will you define and evaluate the cultural change in the short-, mid- and long-term?

Remember, digital transformation is just a means to an end, the enabler for strategic goals that will be activated by real living human beings. Without understanding people’s work styles, their prioritised needs and ways of collaborating, how much impact can mere tools and processes make? In my next post I will discuss using digital transformation to create positive impact outside the walls of the company.

Is your company getting ready to embark on a new phase of digital transformation? Are you not getting the desired results from previous transformation efforts? If you would like to discuss how a rigorous focus on people and culture can create greater value, contact us.

BEYOND HUMAN-CENTRED DESIGN

In our line of work, it is customary for us to proclaim that we are ‘human-centric’; that good business is driven by understanding the customer. We confidently state that we put people front and centre, to explore what is meaningful to them, how they experience their reality. We assert that through understanding our users, we can identify unmet needs, develop new products, devise successful marketing strategies, break into new markets, and uncover emerging trends. To do this, we draw upon anthropology to help us uncover and understand the motivations, practices, and sociocultural contexts that people operate within, and which inform their consumer behaviour. Anthropology, is, by definition, anthropocentric – centred on humans.

What if I told you, however, that humans aren’t so special. That the very qualities that make us human are not pre-given features but are rather properties generated by our participation in the world at large. In this view, humans are not mere expressions of blueprints started at the moment of conception. Rather, we are shaped and fashioned in the course of our lives through the many different environments that we grow and mature within. And these environments consist of all the worldly things that are part of our existence – people, animals, nature, objects – all the things that make up our world.

If we accept such a view then, what does it mean for our work? Can we continue to place the human front and centre when so much of our being is constituted through our engagement with the world around us? In this blogpost I’d like to put forward the provocation that instead of seeing ourselves as the centre of this world, we should instead start seeing ourselves as only part of this world. When we recognise that we are co-creators within a world that is constantly ‘becoming’, shaped by innumerable forces of which we are but one factor, then we can start designing not just for our fellow humans, but for a world at large.

ROBOTS AND HUMANS

In a recent project we conducted on service robots and human interaction, many of the issues I raise above surfaced in the course of the research as we tackled issues surrounding the introduction of robots into society. Disruptive technologies such as AI, machine learning, and robotics are set to fundamentally challenge and transform almost every facet of our existence in the years to come. Google CEO Sundar Pichai has stated that artificial intelligence will have a bigger impact on the world than some of the most well-known innovations in history: “AI is one of the most important things humanity is working on. It is more profound than … electricity or fire,” said Pichai, speaking at a town hall event in San Francisco in January of this year[i]. Difficult issues will have to be faced as people confront the impact of these changes in terms of jobs, skills, wages, and identity.

This last point is pertinent, since it raises profound questions on the nature of our humanness and the idea of ‘humanity’ as a special, protected class. If we set aside humans as special and unique, we tend to then dehumanise and downscale everything that is non-human, setting the stage for our current malaise where our environment is objectified as a resource to be used up as quickly as possible.

The idea that we have dominion over other things, over nature, that we might somehow “own” them, is a relatively recent phenomenon. For the majority of our history, as hunter-gatherers, we saw ourselves as part of nature, as one and the same, we were neither separate nor apart, but rather just another element in a vibrant and alive environment. With the coming of the agricultural revolution however, and then modern science we gradually became divorced from the world around us, first through domestication and control of the land, and secondly through removing and detaching ourselves from that world so that we might measure and observe it.

INDUSTRY 4.0

We are now on the precipice of a fourth industrial revolution, one marked by emerging technologies in robotics, AI, nanotechnology, and The Internet of Things amongst others. As many have pointed out, what differentiates this transformation from previous revolutions is the constancy, depth and breadth of the changes underway and how they affect every aspect of human organisation, from production to governance and up to and including the human body itself. Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum has stated that “[The fourth industrial revolution] is characterized by a fusion of technologies that is blurring the lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres.”[ii]

As designers and anthropologists who create experiences, it is our responsibility to be at the forefront of these emerging trends. We have the capability to help shape these conversations and start designing a world not just for the few, but for the many. Designing with humans front and centre was a welcome development after far too many years of approaching business design problems soley from product or technology perspectives. However, times are once again changing. We are beginning to witness first-hand the effects of unconstrained environmental waste and the depletion of entire ecosystems. Traditional, linear economic models that cannot account for the ‘externalities’ of environmental impact caused by resource extraction and its impact on the wider social good are no longer fit for purpose. In all areas we will be forced to move from human-centred products to cradle-to-cradle systems that take account of the wider environment. We need to be at the forefront of these changes and start positioning ourselves to help shape this emerging world.

Whilst previous revolutions have drawn distinct divisions between humans and their environment, the newly emerging changes underway signal new ways in which we might conceive of ourselves within the context of our environment. Many commentators have called attention to the threat posed by artificial intelligence and robots for their potential to overpower or out-think humans, a threat which Sundar Pichai is all too aware: “We have learned to harness fire for the benefits of humanity, but we had to overcome its downsides too. So, my point is, AI is really important, but we have to be concerned about it.” And many others have noted the huge benefits to humankind that such a shift may entail. Many however, have overlooked what I think to be a more elemental point: our changing perception of ourselves as the pre-eminent actor in this world.

DESIGNING FOR A SHARED WORLD

As robots and AI become more commonplace, as the technology improves, and we gradually come to interact with them in our daily social lives, there will come a time when we have to consider what, if any, legal rights, robots should be extended. How should we, as moral beings, and society treat them? Our preliminary research indicated that people have a natural tendency to anthropomorphise social robots, to project life-like qualities on to them. Indeed, many such robots, like Softbank’s Pepper robot are designed explicitly to elicit emotional responses in their human interlocutors. This has been further verified in other studies e.g. Kate Darling (2014) reports on military robots designed to defuse mines (by stepping on them) being pulled from active service by their commanders due to the perceived inhumane treatment accorded them[iii].

One argument of course in favour of implementing some kind of charter for the treatment of social robots is the protection of societal values. Already, there have been reports of robot abuse in which researchers have observed children punching, kicking, and generally abusing service robots in shopping malls[iv]. When we deter children (and adults) from mistreating robots, we are firstly discouraging similar types of behaviour from carrying over to other contexts through normalisation and desensitisation, and secondly, encouraging a respect and consideration for all other living and non-living things. In parallel, when we begin to value all things, to accord them our respect, and to downplay our own ‘specialness’ we might begin to forge a more forgiving and empathetic world. When we no longer elevate humans as a unique class over and above things, perhaps we may once again start developing a respect for and dialogue with other non-human things, including our surrounding environment.

To return then to our initial premise, if we humans are shaped and constituted through our interactions, then our conduct with robots and other living and non-living things have a direct bearing upon us. We not only shape the world around us but are shaped back in a mutually reciprocal fashion. In the future then, as designers and researchers, perhaps we might look towards and investigate, not just people, but an active and alive world. For the human mind, as anthropologist Tim Ingold notes “is not ‘inside the head’ rather than ‘out there’ in the world.”[v]

The environmental merit of such a change in perspective is readily apparent. However, is there also a corresponding business case to be made? Let us be clear, human-centricity without sustainability is a dead-end, period. Short-term thinking that fails to consider the systemic impact of our work (and future implications thereof) is not only bad business from a strategy perspective, but furthermore ignores all the signs that we are seeing today from our future customers. This project, and others we have been involved in (most notably a recent project on the aspirations of the so-called ‘Gen Z’) indicate that the next generation recognise and understand the need to pursue more equitable relationships with their fellow humans and their environment at large. In the future, businesses would be wise to take heed of these changing social mores and behaviours. For the companies who get there first, who establish their reputation and brand not only around more sustainable business practices but also fairness, transparency, and accountability will be the ones who forge ahead in the years to come. And for that to happen, it means designing for a world in which we are no longer the pre-eminent actor. It means designing for a non-human centred world.

KEY REFERENCES

[i] Clifford, Catherine. 2018. ‘Google CEO: A.I. is more important than fire or electricity’.Available at: 2018https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/01/google-ceo-sundar-pichai-ai-is-more-important-than-fire-electricity.html

[ii] Schwab, Klaus. 2016. ‘The Fourth Industrial Revolution: what it means, how to respond’. Available at: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/01/the-fourth-industrial-revolution-what-it-means-and-how-to-respond/

[iii] Darling, Kate. 2012. ‘Extending Legal Protection to Social Robots: The Effects of Anthropomorphism, Empathy, and Violent Behavior Towards Robotic Objects’. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2044797 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2044797

[iv] Nomura, Tatsuya et all. 2015. ‘Why Do Children Abuse Robots?’ Available at: http://rins.st.ryukoku.ac.jp/~nomura/docs/CRB_HRI2015LBR2.pdf

[v] Ingold, Tim. 2000. Perception of the environment: Essays on livelihood, dwelling and skill

THE NEXT SUCCESSFUL MOBILITY SOLUTIONS WILL GO BEYOND MEETING FUNCTIONAL NEEDS

How often does the name of a tech company become a verb? The fact that we now “uber” somewhere in the same way we “google” something, is a sign of the disruption that transformed the way people move around. The market for shared-mobility (including ride-hailing, ride-sharing and mobility-as-a-service), which is estimated at $54 billion today (2016)[1], is forecasted to grow yearly by 35% through 2020[2]. By 2030, the global share of miles travelled in shared vehicles could reach 26%, up from 4% today[3].

The challenge for companies moving in this fast-growing space is ferocious competition against players who don’t have to be profitable (in 2016 alone, Uber recorded a $2.8 billion loss[4]). Against such competitors, a frontal assault is borderline suicidal. Yet time and time again, new entrants are trying to secure a share of that growing market. Unsurprisingly, the vast majority fail. But not all. So, what does it take to survive in this cutthroat environment?

Research we conducted earlier this year offers valuable insight to inform a winning B2C mobility strategy. In this article, we will share some guidelines, with a focus on ride-hailing.

DIFFERENTIATING YOUR SERVICE THROUGH FUNCTIONAL BENEFITS ONLY WORKS UP TO A POINT

In U.S. cities, the median waiting time for an Uber is three minutes[5]. In other global cities, it’s about four minutes. People we talked to during our research told us this is good enough, and a shorter waiting time wouldn’t make much of a difference. This is consistent with research done by Lyft that shows that once you hit the three-minute pickup time mark, there is no direct benefit to having more people on the network[6]. Said differently, positive network effects in ride-hailing only work up to a point. This is a powerful insight, as it goes against the common view that ride-hailing is necessarily a city-wide winner-takes-all market.

As a corollary, innovative mobility players can do one of two things to differentiate and gain market traction: 1) focus on improving the drivers’ experience, which has largely been neglected so far – this is how the NY-based startup Juno managed to grow to a $200M valuation in one year[7]; or 2) go beyond meeting functional needs to provide an enhanced experience to passengers and drivers.

RECOGNISE PEOPLE OFTEN ENJOY BEING ON THE MOVE

A commonly held view, mainly in business and economic circles, is that travel time is wasted time. Consequently, when designing mobility solutions, most of the effort is focused on reducing travel time. Yet this is a simplistic view of a complex problem.

When asked about their ideal commute time, people don’t answer “none.” They answer on average 16 minutes[8]. This is consistent with findings from our research. People we interviewed often spoke about their daily journeys fondly. For them it’s a buffer between work and home, a moment to escape from social interactions and pause. Whether driver, passenger, or in public transport people develop routines to make the most of this time, when only they decide what to do. As Josh, a young, inner city resident we interviewed in Melbourne, told us: “I need this 30-minute drive time before arriving at the office. It’s on my ride to work I get my senses and get mentally ready for my day”.

In societies where social pressure is intense because people spend more time at the office or live longer with their parents, the importance of journeys as personal time increases. In Singapore, Uber drivers told us they started driving as a part-time job to create a moment in their lives when they could disconnect from their office jobs and families.

As mobility becomes commoditised, successful services will focus on enriching trips and helping people get the most of that liminal time.

IN A RAPIDLY COMMODITISING MARKET, DIFFERENTIATE BY ENRICHING THE JOURNEY EXPERIENCE

Ride-hailing heavy hitters Ola (Indian market leader), Lyft, and Uber are all on a push to improve their in-car experience. Ola partnered with Qualcomm to build a tablet connected to the vehicle’s operating system, allowing passengers to take control of the in-car experience, including music, video content, e-books, navigation, and temperature[9]. Lyft recently developed an in-car Bluetooth dongle. Uber is focused on building partnerships, including one with the Washington Post to gain access to content, and others with Spotify and Pandora to let passengers play their own tunes during a ride.

The example of Spotify illustrates how small changes can transform the mobility experience. Jaye, an all-star (4.9/5 rated!) Uber-driver from Sydney, told us the most important skill for a driver is understanding after just a few exchanges of words if a passenger wants to chat or not. Yet the first bits of any conversation with a stranger are bound to be boringly generic. Having the passenger playing his own music in the car via Spotify changed that. Jaye told us chatting about a tune the passenger chose is a perfect, personalised ice-breaker, which enabled her to talk more frequently with passengers, without having to go through the mundane predictable chat about the weather.

When their functional mobility needs are met, people stop thinking about how to get from one place to the other and see being on the move as an opportunity to do other things. Best-in-class mobility services will be the ones modular enough to adapt to the contextual needs of users, whether it is disconnecting, socialising, or getting things done.

UNDERSTAND LOCAL MARKET SPECIFICITIES TO EFFICIENTLY CONNECT WITH USERS

While in Singapore, we wanted to understand people’s views of Uber and Grab, the main local competitor. To our surprise, most people we talked to preferred Grab, because they felt it was a local company, with which they could relate to on an emotional level.

Further south, in Indonesia, the local ride-hailing startup GoJek is successfully fending of Uber with a similar strategy: emphasising GoJek drivers and riders as part of a locally rooted community[10]. Most of GoJek’s communication is based on Indonesian culture. As an example, one of their particularly successful campaigns was centred on enabling passengers to donate food during the month of Ramadan[11].

But beyond communication and positioning, the real edge comes from designing services better suited for local markets. Ola is excelling at this. They accepted cash when Uber didn’t. The app was available in eight Indian languages while Uber was only in English. Drivers are paid daily instead of weekly, and vehicles have a wifi hotspot. All of these features are praised by Indian passengers[12].

Since they sold their China operations to Didi Chuxing, Uber’s international efforts are focused on India. The battle between the local champion and the Bay Area juggernaut will be fierce. For now, it is impossible to predict who will come out on top, but designing a ride experience rooted in local needs has been instrumental in allowing Ola to punch above its weight, for now[13].

WHERE ARE THE NEXT OPPORTUNITIES IN MOBILITY?

Unmistakably, ride-hailing already has disrupted mobility. From this revolution, the most valuable privately held technology company in the world has emerged. For users, this first wave of disruption fundamentally transformed how they move around in cities, providing them with better flexibility, convenience, and efficiency. Yet we think most of the disruption still lies ahead.

Ride-hailing is still built on an underlying model where each place has one function: you work at the office, relax at home, and get entertained in bars, cinemas, or restaurants. Uber has been exceptionally successful at optimising this system. But this paradigm is becoming obsolete. Soon, each journey will be conceived not as a negative externality, but as an opportunity to leverage a distinctive set of characteristics (being alone or being surrounded by strangers, being outside or being in a confined sound proof environment, being actively moving or being transported…) to create unique experiences.

If your company is entering the mobility space, don’t pick a battle you can’t win. Instead of vying against Uber to optimise how people go from A to B, look ahead, and design services enriching the mobility experience with a focus on emotional needs.

If you are interested in learning more, drop us an email, or let us know if you’d like a follow-up article diving in on other insights from our research.

REFERENCES

[1] http://www.mckinsey.com/industries/automotive-and-assembly/our-insights/how-shared-mobility-will-change-the-automotive-industry

[2] https://www.rolandberger.com/en/press/Shared-mobility-Global-market-for-shared-vehicles-and-mobility-offerings-to-gro.html

[3] https://www.morganstanley.com/ideas/car-of-future-is-autonomous-electric-shared-mobility

[4] https://www.ft.com/content/52b54056-214d-11e7-b7d3-163f5a7f229c

[5] http://www.newsweek.com/exclusive-heres-how-long-it-takes-get-uber-across-us-cities-289133, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GY6A2KgZplg

[6] Of course, this serves well Lyft business rationale: if every city is a winner takes all market, Lyft’s value is pretty much zero… http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-0105-lyft-growth-20160105-story.html

[7] https://www.curbed.com/2017/1/31/14455292/uber-juno-deleteuber-app-ridesharing-ridehailing

[8] As shown in the foundational study on the positive utility of travel, by Redmond and Mokhtarian https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1010366321778; or vulgarized https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2014/08/the-ideal-commute-is-not-actually-no-commute/375609/

[9] https://www.recode.net/2016/12/3/13765342/uber-lyft-ola-ride-hail-battle-rider

[10] https://theconversation.com/the-limits-of-silicon-valley-how-indonesias-gojek-is-beating-uber-69286

[11] http://www.campaignasia.com/article/go-jek-social-impact-delivered-on-two-wheels/428084

[12] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-06-15/uber-finds-passage-to-india-blocked-by-30-year-old-ola-founder

[13]On this front, Uber could learn from another West Coast global giant: Starbucks. Its successful international expansion, and foray into China, is largely based on carefully crafted product localisation. More: https://rubric.com/en-US/starbucks-product-localization-proof-localization-pays-off-big-time/

ANTICIPATING CREDIBLE FUTURES

Traditional management literature tells us that business success is informed by sound planning and forecasting. Arguably, the 1970s and 1980s where the golden era of this paradigm. Large corporate behemoths, especially in Europe or Japan, were not shying away from making ten, fifteen or even twenty-year strategic plans.

But the zeitgeist slowly, then abruptly, shifted.

The emergence of the change can be traced to Henry Mintzberg’s classic 1994 book “The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning”, in which he produced a body of evidence highlighting the fact that managers consistently overestimate their ability to predict the future, as well as to plan for it rationally. So long for the ten-year strategic plan.

A few years later, in the early 2000s, the idea that the pace of change is accelerating exponentially begun to permeate business circles, starting with the Silicon Valley.

In the words of the star futurist Ray Kurzweil, in his 2001 essay The laws of accelerating return: “An analysis of the history of technology shows that technological change is exponential, contrary to the common-sense, intuitive, linear view. So we won’t experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century — it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today’s rate).”

With change happening so fast, how can you plan ahead?

From trying to plan everything, business leaders switched to believing that any attempt at forecasting the future was futile. This new false modesty [1] is at the root of the Silicon Valley “go fast and break things” mentality.

A recent conversation with an ex-colleague, who had left the company to work at Google, vividly illustrated that point. Asked what surprised her most about the Google culture, she said one single element stood out: the lack of strategic planning.

Sensing my disbelief, she explained that Google’s philosophy is that trying to forecast the future is unproductive: the only way to succeed is to try, fail, iterate, and try again. This might be possible when you’re Google: with virtually unlimited funds, you can have hundreds of teams working in parallel on different hypotheses, then select and combine the experiments that work best, prune the others, iterate and so on. Though arguably, even if you are Google, this method is far from efficient: at a macro level Alphabet so far failed at pretty much everything beyond advertising based business models. [2]

At Fuse we’re convinced that this modern assumption – the idea that the pace of change is now such that forecasting is useless – is plain wrong. Even more so, we believe the increased pace of change requires companies to invest more, not less, in understanding how they can become future-proof.

As we recently worked on several such projects, we articulated our thinking on the topic around an offer we call “anticipating credible futures”.

It’s based on four key assumptions:

1. Anticipating credible futures is a thinking tool, not an end in itself

Predicting the future is indeed impossible. Yet it is the very process of imagining what the future could plausibly be that holds inherent virtues.

Trying to paint a credible future is a forcing mechanism to develop a coherent systemic view of a company’s business context, and how it might evolve.

What are the trends most affecting a given company? How and why are they creating change? How do they interact? What are different tipping points which could push the environment one way or another?

2. While the environment is changing fast, people’s fundamental needs remain the same

Credible futures are also powerful tools to help business executives project themselves in the future context of their customers.

Most innovations fail because of a lack of product-market fit. Said differently, business executives are dramatically overestimating their ability to identify real existing customer needs.

At Fuse we believe the answer to this problem is to embed oneself in the life of people, to move from a theoretical understanding to a practical, grounded, one. To do this for existing needs, we rely on ethnographic research. Doing this for future needs is more challenging, but it’s possible. It requires painting a plausible, concrete, future, and extrapolating how core human needs will express themselves in it.

What new frustrations, or tensions will arise? And hence what problems and use cases will be worth solving?

3. To be beneficial, long-term strategic plans must be flexible

The environment in which companies operate is increasingly complex and volatile. In this context, business anticipation needs to happen within a flexible framework.

Its purpose is not to lay out a complete, precise and rigid strategic plan for the company – that would be futile and counterproductive.

In the words of Mintzberg “sometimes strategies must be left as broad visions, not precisely articulated, to adapt to a changing environment”.

Most importantly, this has an essential impact on organisational design: flexible strategies need to be supported by organisations that can adapt to change. Those organisations will more likely than not be horizontal, resilient, and above all foster a culture of autonomy in alignment.

4. In an increasingly complex environment, to have a “north star” helps taking key decisions

Having adaptable strategies doesn’t mean being erratic and purely reactive. On the contrary, anticipating credible futures enables companies to set their “north stars”: key principles and beliefs to follow in the face of uncertainty [3].

Yet defining these north stars is only the beginning. It’s when they are shared and interiorised by the whole organisation, that they can become powerful tools to align activities, rally troops and foster a strong, coherent, culture.

In a follow-up article we will detail our approach to credible future anticipation, and illustrate the methodology with concrete examples from past projects.

If this topic is important for your company, or you would like to know more about our insights and perspective on anticipating credible futures, please contact us.

DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION TO ELEVATE PARTNERSHIPS

In our last article in this series, we pointed out that the biggest hurdles to successful digital transformation are cultural, not technical. Go-to-market strategy, culture, and individual employees must be aligned to identify the core purpose of a transformation. Once we develop a clear picture of where we are today — and where we want to go, we can then identify, design and deploy the digital tools and processes that people can and will use to achieve this future state. Many of the people in this digital transformationequation are partners, external organisations and independent individuals who help us deliver value to our customers.

YOU DON’T WORK IN A VACUUM

Previously, we have addressed how to align your own strategy, culture and employees. However, your business does not operate exclusively, or even primarily, as a stand-alone entity. Increasingly, business is networked rather than siloed. Unique offers are delivered to your customers through complex ecosystems, and value is not created in a top-down fashion from the centre of your company, but rather from the edge, where you gain access to new capabilities, partner your way into emerging areas of growth, and experiment with service models. 

For example IKEA + TaskRabbit collaborate to deliver and assemble furniture to appeal to a new segment of customers. IBM partners with startups to fill gaps in their offering portfolio in exchange for exposure and scale. FedEx integrates with eCommerce software maker Magento to make installation and customisation in clients’ storefronts and warehouse. In this completely new landscape, your partners’ strategies, cultures and employee experiences must align with your own — at least at key milestones and for joint activities — so you are able to work effectively together to quickly respond to opportunities before others. Then you can determine the key digital tools to support your collaboration.

It’s difficult enough to create new work practices within a single company; working across organisations amplifies the potential barriers to getting this right. However, if we see these collaborations for what they are — finite numbers of individuals coming together to achieve defined goals — it is easier to visualise how we can do this. If we create the minimum necessary alignment, we can develop the right digital environment to support cross-company teams.

VISUALISING THE “PARTNER JOURNEY” HELPS PRIORITISE TRANSFORMATION EFFORTS

Who exactly are we talking about collaborating with externally? That depends on the unique nature of every business, their needs and opportunities. Collaborators could come from any of the following:

Customers — B2C, B2B, B2B2C, B2G, B2E, channel partners
Contingent workers — seasonal and support support, gig workers, domain experts
Startups and agencies — who depend on SaaS tools like Dropbox, Trello and Slack
Key suppliers — providers of key raw materials, components or assembly
Strategic partners — who stand shoulder-to-shoulder with you to deliver solutions

DETERMINE WHERE TO START FOR THE GREATEST IMPACT

With whom can you generate the measurable business value through digitally transformed collaborations? How do you specifically expect to create this new value? Is it with one particular supplier, or should you focus on an interaction that is repeated frequently with multiple outside parties? There are many paths to designing win-win collaboration models with select partners like those above, from innovating faster and in more targeted ways, to integrated inventory and distribution, shifting from reactive commodity relationships to proactive partnerships, and dynamic workforce and capabilities reshaping.

Once you have prioritised opportunities to innovate your collaborations with select partners, you will need to consider their size, operating models, and IT environments and policies to determine what is the right level of joint transformation that will actually work. This might mean customisation of your existing tools, developing APIs to provide greater access to each others’ data and core systems, or shifting of your IT policies to allow secure use of essential SaaS tools. Getting to the right level of transformation may also require deeper organisational analysis of partner relationships lifecycle, touch points with your company, and their common way of working and communicating in order to unlock the most joint value possible.

COLLABORATING WITH EMPLOYEES OF BOTH ORGANISATIONS LETS YOU IDENTIFY THE BIGGEST OPPORTUNITIES, SOLUTION REQUIREMENTS, AND ENSURES SUCCESSFUL ADOPTION

Any successful digital transformation comes from an alignment of strategy, culture and individual employees. To achieve this beyond the boundaries of your own business requires understanding of your partner’s strategy, culture and employee motivations and ways of working. In the spirit of agile experimentation, you can start with small experiments to deliver wins for both sides that is difficult for competitors to replicate.

WE CAN HELP

Is your business finding itself more deeply entwined with key partners than ever before? Do you want to explore how to analyse your opportunities to transform your collaborations with them? If you would like to discuss how we can design collaborative programs to find your opportunities, contact us.

WHY FUSE?

Fuse’s collective practice is based on three fundamental beliefs: 

1. To be differentiated and sustainable, a business must provide uniquely valuable solutions to needs that are shared by an addressable group of customers.

2. To identify these needs and their unique solutions that fit people’s lives, companies must develop a deep understanding of customers.

3. This approach also applies to employees, partners, and any other critical stakeholders in a business.

These beliefs form a virtuous cycle and have consumer-centric implications both from outside-in and inside-out perspectives.

OUTSIDE IN

The external factors in people’s lives are changing quickly and constantly. However, people’s deep motivations and needs remain relatively unchanged over time. What people desperately want are ways to map their needs to the current landscape of solutions to:

• Neutralize barriers introduced to their lives and amplifying the enablers

• Sort new solutions that actually fit their lives from the false promises that don’t deliver

• Minimize time and effort spent learning how to do things in new ways, so they can maximize time spent on reaching goals related to what’s important to them

To help them do so, we need to have high-resolution knowledge of the people we want to reach — their dreams, fears, frustrations, capacity to embrace the new, real-life contexts and constraints — in order to create value propositions and experiences that differentiate on clear and measurable benefits.

To develop this understanding in our constantly changing world, we need to continually learn from our customers as they truly are today, and who they will become tomorrow. We can’t look at past behaviours, we can’t assume ourselves or our loved ones to be universal proxies, we can’t go from the gut. The quality of our human understanding determines the relevance and quality of the solutions we arrive at. This understanding is disruptive in nature and determines where to focus; rapid iteration based on faulty hypotheses simply leads to endless refinement of the wrong solution.

INSIDE OUT

Customers’ shifting expectations, new technologies and increasing competition bring an urgent need for businesses to change. Digital transformation is not really about IT tools and processes, but about rebooting company cultures to create resilience and agility that can cope with a world of heightened volatility and ongoing disruption.

The key is finding new and sustainable ways of working that unleash people’s creativity to experiment so they can create impact within their organisations. This requires alignment between strategy, culture and the individual that comes from establishing a truly customer-centric workforce, so that everyone is pulling in the same direction and looking for business value that clearly provides customers with what they value, in ways they understand, and in forms they can use.

Leadership, employees and partners need a shared vision of what customer-centricity means for their situation. This vision must be translated into models for identifying unmet needs when interacting with customers, tools for capturing needs and framing solutions, two-way communications linking strategy and customer-facing functions, and feedback mechanisms to include customers in this conversation.

HOW FUSE CREATES VALUE

The statement up top are at the core of the belief system that we have refined over many years in our work with corporates, scale ups, startups and NGOs.

We work in every industry, on every continent, across every segmentation of people, and serve every arena of human needs to help clients ensure they are creating the right products, services, touchpoints and communications to connect wth their clients in uniquely valuable ways.

Deep understanding of who your customers are, what is important to them and how they structure their lives, is an absolutely critical input to generating new value propositions, business models and service concepts. Incredibly, the need for this foundational knowledge is often overlooked, dismissed as unimportant, or considered too costly or time consuming. It is none of these things. The quality of results is limited by the quality of inputs. The line dividing success from failure is razor thin. We can enable this understanding of your customer to keep you on the right side of this line.