Three Truths and a New Opportunity
Over the past five years, three truths have emerged with undeniable clarity.
In the intervening years, intelligent technologies have become the animating force throughout many leading organizations. These now-ubiquitous technologies are not only remaking processes, they are also opening up new sources of value, underpinning new business and operating models, addressing some of the most intractable business and social challenges, and moving leaders to see technology and strategy as inseparable. That exponential expansion—from processes to products, algorithms to architecture, systems to platforms, strategy to sustainability—is the new reality for all organizations, no matter the business they are in.
That the pace of change is picking up is of course a cliché of business literature in every era. But this time there’s a big difference. It’s not just that potentially game-changing technology will keep appearing at what seems like a faster rate, but that a great many companies now know that they can change far faster than they, or anyone, believed possible. Until Roger Bannister ran the first sub-four-minute mile in 1954, it was a speed widely believed to be unattainable.1 But within forty-six days of Bannister’s breaking the barrier, another runner did it. A year later, three runners in a single race did it. Since then, more than a thousand runners have accomplished the feat, including eleven high schoolers. Something like that has occurred in business over the past two years. The many companies that accomplished lightning-like transformations have set a new standard for speed that more and more enterprises will now see that they, too, can attain. The old cliché carries new weight: the pace of change is picking up, doubly so.
Of these three truths, this third one is perhaps the least well understood, and the reason we wrote this book. Its full implications are still unfolding. As people’s skills, experiences, and, in some senses, humanity evolve in tune with new technologies, the technologies and their design will, of course, need to further adapt. And as they adapt, individual and collective capabilities and perspectives will further evolve. In reality, this has always been the nature of the human-tool symbiosis. What’s different now is that it’s happening much faster and with much broader reach.
Taken together, these three truths and recent history have brought us to a new inflection point. We’re facing a set of global circumstances we’ve never seen before. Radically human technology and the ability to transform at astonishing speed have given us the power to break through many of the traditional constraints of business and create almost anything we can dream up. On the other hand, the journey of reinvention has only just begun. Virtually every industry remains a blank slate waiting to be defined. It’s a once-in-a-generation opportunity to actively shape our future from the ground up. To finally, definitively operationalize values. To move fast and fix things. At this moment of truth for technology and for people, companies that fully embrace their newfound power to reimagine everything from their talent to data, architecture, and strategy will lead the way in business performance and to a future that works better for everyone.
The stakes couldn’t be higher; the opportunity couldn’t be greater. All of the phenomena we examine throughout this book—more natural artificial intelligence, manageable small data, machine teaching, living systems, trustworthy AI, the unleashing of talent—make technologies more recognizably human. As these new terms of our relationship with technology unfold, we will find ourselves moving deeper and deeper into reflections about what makes us truly human. In the final analysis, that may offer the most radically human hope for the future.