[MUSIC PLAYING] PETER HINSSEN: I'm really
happy to be here this morning to talk, indeed, about what
I started calling the "never normal." Just as a background,
I am a technologist. That's the lens through
which I look at the world. And as Wayne said, I wrote
a book about this exactly 10 years ago, which I
called The New Normal, which was a reflection on what
would happen in a world where technology-- digital-- would stop being special
and just become normal. And that's exactly what
happened over the last decade. So we've entered
into this new normal. We've been riding this S
curve where, in the beginning, it was strange and we
didn't understand it. And it started to rise,
and then it flipped over into the new normal. And you could probably
say digital is normal now. I was in Italy the year
before the pandemic, the summer before the pandemic,
where an Italian artist had painted the logos of today
onto the artifacts of the past. And it's wonderful to observe
how the world out there has changed as a result of that,
how the media functions in a completely different
way, how a community actually runs completely different
in the new normal. And I loved this--
two old ladies chatting under a Twitter sign. We are in this new normal. We're constantly connected. And I'm certainly not blind to
some of the negative elements of that. I mean, if you think about
the addictive powers of some of these technologies. But thank God we have that
new normal in what I think was the great acceleration
in the last 18 months. Imagine that we would
have had the pandemic without the new normal. It seems so harmless
and so far away, and then changed
all of our lives. It reminded me very much of one
of my favorite sci-fi movies of the last century, which was
called The Day the Earth Stood Still. And what we encountered
in the last 18 months was not a day, not a
week, not a quarter. More than a year, we
saw things that we never thought we would ever
see in our lifetime. And it was a global
displacement, which, for many
companies, also meant that 2020, as a turning point,
was the great digital stress test. We had to figure out if we
could still survive in a world where digital was
our only option. I don't know how you
survived lockdown, but in our house with
two teenage kids, there was a perfect
correlation between the quality of the Wi-Fi signal in our
house and my appreciation as a father. Wi-Fi good? I was OK. Tiny hiccup in YouTube
or TikTok and they openly started questioning
if I ever got a degree in computer science. And it wasn't just lockdown. In almost every
exit scenario, we saw that technology was
playing an ever-increasing role into our lives. I love this example of a robot
dog in Singapore patrolling a park to see if people were
respecting social distancing. What is interesting is during
the great acceleration, many companies started to
realize that digital wasn't just the cherry on the cake. It could be a big
part of the cake. But many companies
also realized that what they had done in the last
decade was not always true digital
transformation, but often it was digital translation. They put a little bit of
layer of digital veneer on top of old analog processes. And that clearly didn't work. I think we're now entering a
red pill, blue pill moment. Some people get excited
about the new new normal. Some people are getting a little
homesick for the old normal, especially now in
this BC/AC changeover, before and after corona. The vaccines are
starting to kick in. Well, first of all, it's going
to take longer than we thought. I mean, omicron is a
good example of that. And second of all-- that's
my fundamental thesis-- what if the old normal
doesn't exist anymore? I believe we're
getting into a world where we're probably
going to see more shocks and not just technological, but
biological, ecological, social, geopolitical. And that's what I
call the never normal. It's a strange world
where even tiny things can have huge global consequences. I think we're going to have
more and more unknown unknowns, and that's exactly what the
never normal is all about. But what is fascinating is that
we shouldn't be afraid of that because every single one
of those seismic shocks actually is an opportunity. It creates systemic shifts,
and those are opportunities if you play it well. Look at consumer behavior. Consumer behavior was
already greatly altered as a result of digital. We can analyze consumers
and observe them and find patterns and predict
better than ever before. And then COVID came
along and basically just accelerated
the acceleration in consumer behavior. Similar things in work dynamics. But more fundamentally,
in this never normal, we're going to see volatility
when it comes to business and operating models. We're going to see extreme
volatility in terms of capacity and resources
necessary to implement our strategy. And I believe,
fundamentally at the heart of that, is figuring out
how we can accelerate this idea of turning
raw information into actionable knowledge. Because if we
don't have that, we won't make sense of
the never normal. This never normal is
filled with opportunities, but the most crucial
thing is timing. I'm not going to bore you with
too much theory this morning, but this is the famous
theory of optionality. Whatever you do, you
start, you grow, you peak, and you decline. And we all know that if
you wait until the very last moment, that's too late. Even when you're going
down, not a good idea. And I would argue
in the old normal, you could wait until
your business peaks and then you would
think about what's next. But now you have to
actually reinvent yourself the moment that you're actually
still capable of doing that. And that brings me to an old
statement from Peter Drucker that I love. "The greatest danger
in times of turbulence is not the turbulence but to
act with yesterday's logic." I love that quote. But if Drucker would be
alive, he would probably add it's not the turbulence. It's to act with yesterday's
logic or data or tools. So how can we accelerate that? How can we turn information
into a valuable asset in the never normal? And the recipe for that
is actually quite simple. If you want to connect
the dots, you first have to collect the dots. And I really
believe in the power of analytics, the power of AI. I believe in the power
of man plus machine. And I think this
is the gap we're going to have to figure out. We're going to live in a never
normal world where technology becomes even more important. And at the same time, we have
to focus on the human in this. As Wayne said, I wrote a book,
The Phoenix and the Unicorn. I mean, we all know
the unicorn stories. But what about phoenixes,
traditional companies that can reinvent themselves? And I think the
magical recipe for that is to keep a keen eye on what
I call the day after tomorrow. It's not always easy to
interpret new opportunities and immediately put
them into practice. I came up with a
very simple model-- how much time we spend on
today, tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow. Today is the hundreds of emails
you get, the dozens of Zoom calls. Tomorrow is next year's budget. But the day after tomorrow is
new ideas, new opportunities, new innovations,
new technologies, new tools that can help you
really fundamentally rethink what you do. When I ask executives
they say, oh, 70, 20, 10. Reality is often 93, 7, and 0. Problem is value. Today is important,
tomorrow even more so. But the day after
tomorrow is crucial if you want to
reinvent yourself. Fortunately, some companies even
have that big ugly red square with negative energy, which
we call the shit of yesterday. But that's why I
believe companies that focus on the
day after tomorrow will be able to
reinvent themselves. So if we want to
reinvent ourselves, I think we have to be bold on
the vision and then flexible on the details. So let me leave you
with a little recipe. I call it VACCINE. The V is for velocity. The world is moving faster. We will have to move faster. I love this quote
from Mario Andretti, "If everything
seems under control, you're just not
going fast enough." But even more important
is the A for agility. I love the analogy of
the whitewater kayaker. When I did this first, I
was scared out of my mind. I thought the water
could kill me. The rocks could crush me. But I had a really
good instructor who showed me how to use the
power of the change, the power of the river, to actually
become even more agile. Speed, agility-- the
C is for creativity, and the I is for innovation--
relentless innovation, product, market, service, and
model innovation. But the last two are crucial. The N is for networking. We live in the network age,
not in the digital age. But we're going to have to try. We will need the E
of experimentation. We will have to build the
psychological safety to try, to have the guts to experiment. And I love what Mandela
said, "I never fail. I either win or learn." I believe if companies really
want to increase innovation, they will have to lower
their cost of failure. You know what? You can't wait for the
final HBR article anymore. This is no longer just
about lessons learned. It's about lesson learning,
figuring it out as we go along. The future is
already here, but let me end with my favorite
quote from Maya Angelou-- "If you're always
trying to be normal, you will never know how
truly amazing you can be." I wish you the very best
in the never normal. Thank you very much.
