Kyle Nel | Leading Transformation | SingularityU Nordic Summit 2018

hello party people okay good this thing works fantastic um how are you feeling after a day and a half of this good for all of you that didn't say anything that's your bad anyway all right so I'm a behavioral scientist by trade and so everything that I look at is through that lens how are people making decisions either overtly or implicitly and then how do individuals get together to make those decisions and groups so that's what I studied in academia and which ultimately led to me leaving academia who else has left academia after realizing all right good job I learned very quickly that if you actually want to do stuff and not just write about stuff you got to leave so anyways I left and to apply these crazy ideas that I had and to see if they could actually work cuz I no one had actually done it before and I believed that innovation is not this or transformation is not this magical mythical thing if you think about what the stories are transformation innovation think about the stories we tell Thomas Edison Nikola Tesla Steve Jobs Elon Musk they're these great men stories yes wonderful amazing people but undergirding that is not magic it's process and they're either doing it once again overtly or implicitly so it was like how do we take all of these mythical stories and actually productize it and systematize it so that anyone can do it who works at a boring legacy organization I shouldn't have said boring who works at a traditional organization all right you're my people guess what that's the majority of workers and leverage and Industry on this planet so so much focus is on the startup that's amazing guess where all the locked up potential is every single one of you that raised your hands so that was what it was about how do we go inside of a traditional dare I say boring organization and do massive transformational things so that no one can say oh I work here we can't do that - cool cool alright so I'm from the u.s. of course and I have a beard so I'm going to talk about the future there is no future right so usually someone that looks like me will stand up and go oh I know the future and you have to pay me large sums of money to tell you this future that's garbage you either deluded or just a huckster and or both this is what I think the future is does anyone read these choose your own adventure books growing up I don't know this is the thing here in the Nordics but I love these books when I was a kid I was obsessed these books basically what it was it's every single book had a different premise and the first couple of pages like five or ten pages were setting up the assumptions this was you live underwater the year is 2015 this was far in the future back then and then set up the story and then you were presented with a series of choices and then you went and then based on what choice you took you flipped to that page and then you were presented with more information and then a series of choices so on and so forth that is the world you live in so think about this the real actual thing here is understanding and getting better information and better assumptions why you're here you have secret knowledge now there are people that don't have any idea that the stuff that's going on is actually going on you do now so you have a better set of assumptions now the question is what will you do with that that's the real hard part you know you're gonna sound like an insane person when you go back to your office and you're like oh yeah and then whatever you say next you know what I'm saying you probably had this conversation with your significant other how was your day honey well we're not gonna eat meat anymore okay so anyway cuz ultimately it's about assumptions and then making choices okay but the primary problem is not a skills problem most organizations believe that when they need to change and transform oh we need it as somebody in AI we need a blockchain person you might have had these thoughts yourself that is not the primary problem in my view the primary problem is this is this people so this was a study that was actually done by a bunch of academics years ago where they wanted to see if our faces had changed in aggregate in North America I don't know why this is what you do when you're an academic so they ran tens of thousands if you can tell I'm pretty bitter I didn't get tenure um tens of thousands of year booked photos through this computer facial recognition software and honestly and truly one of the only findings they found was that we smile more in pictures and the reason why I bring this up is to show you that we aren't changing very much the hardware the software that's you that's me that's your spouse that's your kids that's your employee that's your employer is not changing very much right but this is the humble telephone during roughly the same time period and I bring this up to show we are living in an exponential world for sure guess what's not growing and changing exponentially us so our parents and our grandparents could have worked doing the exact same job as we all know we cannot so when a person is met with a lot of change what do they do yay I love this this is fantastic no they hunker down and cry and wait for it to be over and organizations corporations are people they're made up of people corporations are a legal person and they do largely the same thing oh oh this is happening you know if you go back to the companies that have been decimated or wiped out Sears Kodak Blockbuster all the big ones and the ones no one's ever heard of years before you hear they are met with this disruption and they say stuff like we're gonna focus on our core we're gonna get back to the basics have you ever heard that language inside your company run you cannot cut your way to prosperity that might be a strategy that's a mitigation for a time but you cannot grow by cutting your way forever and hunkering down forever it doesn't work look the evidence is fairly damning can I tell you a story ok good the year was 2012 it was a simpler time especially for America a kinder time it's hard being an American these days anyway President Obama's just won a second term I know and hurricane sandy has wiped out large parts of the Northeast has anyone been to the Northeast recently you can still see they're still recovering so you're seeing the effects of global climate change in the United States and this gentleman was rockin the charts remember sigh yeah I hope he saved his money okay and I worked at this place Lowe's who's been to a Lowe's before all right some people all right cool it's when I think when I say Lowe's is the next thing you think like disruptive innovation exactly that's why I worked there so I worked at Walmart before which is another story but which my wife we lived in Bentonville Arkansas my wife describes as imagine a place and then take away stuff I loved it it was great anyway so I worked at Lowe's and I was in charge of international research so I was brought in to run research now it's like the most American thing in the world to say international research right the United States is the center of the universe and everything else is this is amorphous international place and so we had done this thing where we had grown from sea to shining sea with our giant boxes all over right and there's only so many places you could put these giant boxes and we said this is before I got there well there is a place above us called Canada and a place below has called Mexico if they love it here they're gonna love it there we put these exact same boxes I mean exact same boxes in Canada and Mexico anyone want to guess how they did exactly it was horrible and guess why there are different countries and Canada was bad but Mexico was real bad so I went into Mexico to figure out what it was what was going on and I did a bunch of fancy schmancy interviews and spent a lot of money doing marketing research and ultimately what it led to was I would interview people and they would go I don't know what a Louis Louis is what is Louis and I was like well I explained what it is like oh cool I'd love to go there so my findings were to the seat to the to the president Louis Mexico and his staff whose job it was to make was to make money by the way it was pretty simple why don't we take these beautiful boxes and write I don't know hammers and stuff it seems pretty obvious so the form in which this took where I was presenting this information if you want to if you want to convince important people in your organization to do stuff what form does that take power making a killer PowerPoint presentation much like I'm doing today and so I presented it the most obvious and I'm guessing most tied into their incentives not a big thing nuts and light and saying sell motorcycles or go to space I'm just saying like tell people what's that on the inside on the outside crazy idea and they literally said to me Kyle great presentation I'm not doing any of it not in so many words I think I got a high five - um I was so tired of this has anyone given a great presentation that no one did anything you asked them to do the system is broken people the whole point of having the presentation in the meeting was to get you to do something so I don't care that you liked it I wanted you to do the thing in the thing the system is broken so I had had enough I'd had enough so I'd out all these crazy ideas but I was scared because these are crazy ideas and so at this point I'm not doing this anymore I'm refusing now to go along with the system because it's not working I'm not getting the behavior change that I needed so long story short I figured it all out and we did some amazing things so I'm gonna talk about real quickly some of the big things that we did and then I'll talk about how we did it so cool all right so we built exosuits for our employees so they wear these non electronic EXO suits that are now we license out later on and are being used by large companies all over the world we built a 3d scanning company that's being used by Lowe's and all of its direct competitors which is pretty crazy so you have truckloads of objects being scanned at high speed we built the largest virtual and augmented reality showrooms and stores on the planet and you can download this app on your phone in partnerships with Google Microsoft magically and others we put a store in space that's right in partnership with NASA and our friends at Maidan space a singularity University company we help put the first permanent 3d printer in the international space station so the first thing commercially manufactured off the planet is a low stool and then we brought all of that tech back down earth so if you go to some low stores you can bring something and it's broken or you want to replicate and we will scan it for you digitally piece it back together for you and then you can print it any material Lowe's and NASA makes perfect sense right we built the largest virtual and augmented reality training stores so if you want to learn how to do something instead of waiting for that weird third Thursday at 6:45 why is it already over he's at 45 I don't know why you just pop on a headset and you learn how to do it it's actually 40 to 50 percent more effective than the class on training you how to do it and then we also built the first autonomous robots that speak 25 different languages and do inventory tracking inside of the store and are now being used by many many retailers across the world Lowe's right of course makes perfect sense right Lisa Lisa didn't before and then and then it laddered up to Lowe's is this year was was ranked for the most innovative company in a R and D are not amongst retailers in the world unity who makes most of the software's number for this it makes no sense at all right this is exponential T playing out right and then Lowe's was named the the most number one in innovation amongst retailers and that's a big deal for recruiting right which is the pitted battle we're all in all right that's all great how do you do it well it's attacking this problem first so this is Google Trends and this is in the US and this is spikes every year just after Christmas and drops off two weeks into January anyone want to guess what the search term is you hamster feed work out yeah pretty close gym membership oh man it's a lot of fruitcake I'm a little bigger these days so when that person is typing in gym membership do they actually believe this is the year we're going to workout I'm gonna get this thing called ABS but everyone keeps talking about I believe that too so when they're typing it in they actually believe it they actually believe they're gonna work out right they're actually going to do it now organizations do the exact same thing have you been to the proverbial innovation meeting every year you seem to have the same meeting this is the year we're gonna innovate look I have a 2x2 grid we're down here or up here I don't know you're usually in a corner and the other people are over there I don't know they're coming closer up down we're not sure but it's bad we're gonna innovate let me show you I have 17,000 slides about how we're gonna do it but we got it you know why because we hired a big consultancy to tell us how to do it anyway but then what gets in the way the belief is there just like working out but the company doesn't get apps and the reason why is because we're people and we're not addressing the primary problem right and that's that even me a behavioral scientist I still do this I travel a lot and I have the most well traveled workout clothes on the planet they should have their own frequent flyer miles but they never come back dirty and this is playing out here too um I'd rather stay and hang out with Chris at night he's he's bad but anyway but every time I put my workout clothes in my bag I think this is the time I'm gonna work out does anyone else done this on this trip I know this is cathartic we're get we're healing right all right so how do you dress this problem how do you dress this workout problem the innovation meeting well it's not by getting rid of the 2 by 2 grid maybe it should be but it's about thinking about what the organization actually is most organization especially legacy organizations operate and think sequentially this is not bad this is actually very very good for creating stuff now if you work in an organization like this and you probably do most organizations are even small ones that means there are many steps and you pass things from thing to thing when you try to make a change in this organization even a small one does anyone ever tried to make a change at all how do they do they love it they freaked out but before that they'll say oh I really am very innovative but not me that side over there needs to innovate I'm good right so if you try to make a change this organization of freaks axis exists almost perpetuate itself if you think of it almost as in a live thing you can kind of get that right so in a world where things are constantly changing just operating a business is getting harder and harder a company exists at least what I was taught in grad school in order to provide shareholder value have you heard this before that's getting harder and harder can we say that is that true right so even just doing the basic basic is hard and then you get these things where whatever industry you're in retail whatever you get these emails or trends that are flying through and your executive team starts sending weird emails around what are we doing to react to this what's our plan against that just ever happen in your business no you guys are much better you're very systematic you've got it all figured out but we would spend all of our time reacting instead of proactively building right so then the next year that's how you have the innovation meeting again this is why we're gonna innovate but this stuff keeps on happening and then that's just providing shareholder value now you have an even more interesting thing happening everyone heard of the Larry letter at Davos this year so the capitalist capitalist the head of Blackrock says now we will not invest in you if you do not not only do you have to do all the basic stuff like provide shareholder value and be awesome but you also have to talk about how what your organization does positively contributes to Humanity think about that if you are this organization you have no idea how to do that right so you have it's harder and harder to to just be you and you now have the like Scrooge McDuck of the capitalist world saying you have to talk about how to save the planet it is really really hard so the only real reaction that seems to be manifest amongst large organizations is to do one very unique and weird thing and that is to start an Innovation Lab do you have an Innovation Lab I am real sorry I've started a couple so I can talk crap about it they all play out the same way no matter the industry you go to whatever hipster part of the town you're from hmm there are a large number of coffee shops here this is fantastic we will set up shop there in some abandoned warehouse that's being gentrified or you just go to San Francisco because the whole thing is that and you hire a bunch of people that look like me and but are usually engineers nothing wrong against engineers and then you buy a bunch of 3d printers no matter the industry you show me an Innovation Lab and I'll show you a 3d printer and you do a bunch of weird crap like this like this kid with this weird QR code ish thing on his head staring I don't know if he's praying to it or what I hope I meet this guy someday I really do and then what you do is an executive team is you go to your innovation lab and you go wow look at all these kids look at all these 3d printers all those weird crap they're making we are innovating and then you go to other innovation labs and you do like this Silicon Valley Zoo tour where you stare at these zoo creatures in there and their natural habitat and you think wow I have absorbed so much kombucha and innovation we are really feeling it and like Mary Poppins just as mysteriously as it appears it disappears because it really wasn't providing any value so if you think about all the innovation labs and all the money and time spent on it can you think of serious massive transformation that's happened as a result of the Innovation Lab maybe one or two stories that's messed up that's a system that doesn't work think about it's not really solving the core problem what you've actually done and this is actually what ends up playing out is you're hiring a bunch of really smart people teaching them your problems of your industry paying them to think about them then they get frustrated because there's no real way to ingest it back into the organization they get frustrated they leave then they become your competitor that happens over and over and over again because the problem is really this the paperclip there was a study that was done where basically you had to solve a problem solve a problem and you were presented there were two groups and you were presented with this scenario we needed to solve a problem a physical problem and the solution was a wire now if the person was presented a problem with a wire when it was just laid out like this like and here's your wire ninety-eight percent of the people could solve the problem if you were presented with it where it was a paper clip on the piece of paper that the problem was written on 2% we're able to solve the problem now the reason why I bring this up is that our problems are paper clip problems we have a lot of the tools we just don't know how to undo the thing we're not thinking about it that way to think what are the resources that we had and how do we undo it that makes sense so we have to like Chris was saying we have to untrain ourselves and deprogram ourselves to think oh my gosh i can use this paper clip right so the process is pretty simple it's a three-step process we call it moving from little T little T transformations to big t transformations it goes like this first you have to create a strategic narrative and what I mean by that is what is your actual story and I'm not talking about a vision I'm not talking about a mission I'm saying what is your actual story what are the characters the conflict and the narrative arc of where your organization has been where it is now and where it is going if you don't know what that is you're doomed doomed you can create it every organization has its Genesis story so you know that first day when you start and you're like oh Helen and Bob had this great idea and then they had this problem and they overcame it and boom now we exist what isn't really told is where we're going afterwards right and organizations that have real power back to the Walmart example this stories were palpable and you knew what we were doing right that's how big organizations can thrive and survive and small ones do so if you do not have a strategic narrative with characters conflict in a narrative arc you are in deep trouble second is breaking bottlenecks every organization has bottlenecks that keep stuff from happening so is your organization hierarchal is it flat is it maniacal is it evil all those things documenting what those things are and where the bottlenecks are is the first step so when you are after you create your narrative then you lay out how our decisions actually being made and then you address where are the pain points and then you address your strategy just like you were going to market except you're going to market in your own organization right it's too little focus is put on the political and structural way the said decisions get made but that is the primary problem you can't focus on the customer until you get it through the system first right so that's the primary issue and then third is you have to have new KPIs and new measures of success if you do not have quantitative trackable measures of success also doomed because everyone loves numbers it's just the way organizations work but guess what you do not use mature metrics and I'll talk about that later you have to use new KPIs cool all right so now of course I'm going to talk about Jurassic Park so back to the story story is so critical who's heard of Joseph camel before oh man so few people read joseph campbell who's heard of star wars it's a small film there's a wookie George Lucas read joseph campbell joseph campbell basically figured out all of narrative read every single large religious mythical and and great work of narrative and have story across the world he like locked himself in a can and in a cabin basically and he laid out what made a great story and George Lucas read this and he stole it and created Star Wars so Michael Crichton also stole from Joseph Campbell they're all friends but Joseph Campbell stole from Joseph Campbell but he added in his own little piece that I really loved and that was he interviewed experts on the far fringe right so think about Jurassic Park we're kind of taken for granted now but this is the 90s so the idea of extracting DNA from another dead thing to create and clone other things it's pretty insane right at the time but he was able to take all of that information and then put it into a narrative format yes a dystopian one but able to do that so I stole just like George Lucas I stole from Joseph Campbell but also from Michael Crichton and and then applied all of this into a business context so what I did was I took all of our marketing research and trend data and I gave it to professional published science fiction writers and said what would all of this stuff because it's not about AI it's not about blockchain it's not about new food it's not about this it's about how it all mixes together in the cauldron of our experience it's not one thing it's all of it and our brains just cannot set that up and receive it they just can't it's too big and so then that's why we just kind of like let's just wait for it to be over right and we can't do that so the only forum and I've studied this at extreme lengths the only forum that people receive new disruptive information and do something about it is through stories think about it you are wired to love and receive stories I said before I gave and cut into the story can I tell you a story the reason why I did that is a little bit of dopamine and oxytocin gets released in your brain I can see that everyone sits forward a little bit more you don't even have to tell a story afterwards that's how much we love and receive stories think about it we give up time of money of sleep of everything for story we'll even watch the same story over and over and over again think about how many times you're like oh I'm not gonna sleep tonight because I'm gonna binge-watch something stupid because you love stories so much so then why don't we use stories in our daily life better right so that's what we did so part of it then too is using behavioral economics so we actually created these stories with these science fiction writers with characters conflict in narrative arc and then actually put them into a comic book and the reason why I did that is our executive team Lowe's had never gotten a strategic document in comic book form and they did just what you're doing I handed him out I was like okay this is career-ending and no one it was an interesting day when I was getting ready for work that day I'm like honey I prepared my resume because this could go really bad and they read it and there was massive disagreement amongst the executive team about what the future was that is the exact conversation we should be happy having right we should be having conversations about where the future is going and then how we get there as a separate separate discussion but where we're going is the primary thing we agreed upon it and this was part of the first comic book and there's a couple redesigning their kitchen and this is before oculus rift came out on Kickstarter and guess where they're not they're not at a store so this is before anybody is talking about vrn AR in any meaningful way and we were way ahead of it because we use story and trends better assumptions and different ways of acting and we were able to take it and run with it so when you're exploring sci-fi you have to curate the data first that comes into the story it's really really important and then assemble a brief for the writers so if you're writing a creative brief for an ad agency it's the same kind of idea you structure the content that comes in through and what you're trying to get the time horizon the primary location and then what you what we did was we worked with many different writers who didn't talk to each other so then we can kind of triangulate on what the key themes might be and try to come up with a consensus so you're gonna get some stories where they're totally out there and weird and some that are super boring and he try to find that middle-of-the-road right and that's worked really really well we've done that over and over again but story doesn't always have to take place in the form of a comic book it's the primary way but one is we we did we also created this thing called pitch and flow that we just sold the South by Southwest which is we had gone through I had gone through another one of these do-gooder help these social entrepreneurs CEOs be better storytellers and after the end of being locked in the middle of nowhere for two weeks with these folks at the end of this event they were pitching to all these VCS and us and they were just less bad storytellers right so the I was lamenting about this and thought well why don't we take somebody who's literally that's their job is to tell stories but also can tell a story to a much wider audience instead of just preaching to the choir right and that is hip-hop old-school hip-hop and rap is socially woke and focused and can also tell a story in a really impactful way that reaches a broad audience so we the crazy idea was why don't we take local MCS and pair them with social entrepreneurs and have spend time with them and then actually create new songs that tell their stories and then we did it for drama purposes created like a rap battle on stage where they were to rap it out and then we were vote guess what happened as a result of that we had so much more coverage about what we were doing there were people that were saying oh I didn't know there were strip mining going on for rare earth minerals and all the issues that were it was as well - that I'm so glad there's a solution for that all of the folks that were involved in these early stages were able to raise money more quickly and sell their products better because we were addressing the narrative problem first and then now it's being done at South by Southwest and OH - great stuff so you can repackage story but it's still the crux of it is story because it's ultimately our first innovation if you think about how powerful stories are it's really the first human innovation to bring us together to make us cohesive and then to take action good or bad stories can be used for evil and for good like any other really amazing tool and once again if you have not read Joseph Campbell read Joseph Campbell so you can steal from him like George Lucas and Michael Crichton and me two noble tradition all right so that's a sheet jig narrative they have to have characters real characters you have to have conflict there's no conflict it's a really boring story and you have to define a real resolution if you don't have these things that's a nykeya furniture assembly diagram right that little Amorphis dude looks really indifferent the entire time okay because ultimately it's about telling these stories okay that's all well and good Kyle but once you have the story then how do you get started well the first thing you do whenever we go into an organization the first thing that we do is we align on nomenclature now you all kind of take it for granted because you're in there but whenever you've moved for one group to a new group you realize they use weird in different words right there's weird acronyms but really what I'm talking about are there are loaded terms good and bad inside of every organization that you don't know unless you get in there an interview there might have been a failed experiment three years ago called hybrid and if anyone uses that word hybrid they are doomed but there's no way you can know that it's not written down on some sheet of paper right so understanding the words and the themes and the stories that are important is critical and too little of that is focused on inside the organization if you can unlock that and you have time to think through what are the stories that are currently being told to justify things inside your organization you will have a power that would allow you to operate on a different level than everybody else and get stuff done so nomenclature words are really important the next is mapping decision trees and archetypes how literally mapping out how does stuff get done how do decisions get made how do I get this story this little thing to happen who are the people I need influence once you lay that out then what you do is overlay on top of that who their archetype is so Carl Jung hero magician outlaw kind of archetypes and it's all in the book too if you haven't read it but but what I would do is whenever I would have a conflict with somebody they weren't doing what I've wanted to do basically legal for instance sorry lawyers their job was to make sure that I didn't burn the whole company down right there a caretaker my my archetype was the magician I was like magic you know so when I would come into the lawyer I would say oh we're gonna do stores in space an exorcism bah bah bah bah bah they're like whoa tiger calm down I'm just gonna smile and nod until the hour is over and then you leave and then I won't do anything and I was having this conflict over and over again and so what I finally did was apply Joseph Campbell and I over I literally went home I wouldn't do this at your work I overlaid who was in my way who was having conflict with and then I put their archetype who I thought they were on top of it and then I did mine and then I wrote down what I wanted then I wrote down what they wanted not what I wanted them to do but what they wanted and then I realized the gulf between those two things was just positioning their job was to keep the company going because that's their job now my job in my view was to keep the company going by not allowing it to get destroyed by disruption right so we actually had the same goal but I was scaring them because I was coming at it in a language that wasn't right so instead of doing that what I instead of talking about swords and space and all its magic what I did was I said Jason it's risky not to take risk and then I gave all of the stories of large companies that were really prevalent prevalent and then don't exist all of a sudden oh I get it if I help you I hope the company sounds crazy but then it completely changed our whole relationship how I viewed him and how he viewed me and he became my best friend at work I could go into his office and I had crazy half-brained ideas and they were we were able to work through it together about how we might actually structure this stuff and then guess what who would go in and pitch these crazy ideas with me my lawyer but that only happens if you're mapping it out be intentional about it think right now just think for a second who's in my way and be personal or work and if you apply this basic framework I promise it'll get better because the change the betterment has to happen somewhere you should start with you all right the other is finding your currency every organization has an abundance of something or some things and then because they have so much of it they devalue it right you all speak more than one language in the US that's crazy because it's international and the fact that you can do that you all just assumed oh yeah that's totally normal but that is a carries a lot of value to me right and so every organization is so much of something they devalue it so then how do you take that thing that you have or things and turn it into a currency that you can trade on not on cash but on currency let me give you an example Lowe's had and has tons of stores and that was seen as kind of an albatross or a millstone around a collective necks because of this digitization of the world in these pure plays but what it really was we're able to flip that by saying no this is actually something we can trade on so I then repositioned it and brought it and create a new KPI is using the neuroscience that you heard dr. Ramzan we talked about yesterday and created neurons and then we were able to use that and go and pitch that to Google and a Microsoft and to magic leap and everybody else and say hey if you give us all of your new stuff that no one knows about yet what we'll do is we'll test it in our stores give you all the applied neuroscience research and you'll be so much further ahead they loved it because they didn't have it but we had an abundance it cost us nothing we were able to get stuff we couldn't even buy right so you have it you just have to unlock it so these bottlenecks are there so how do you translate it your ideas how do you map decision makers and then how do you reframe your pitch and this is not a discrete thing it's not a one-and-done thing this is an ongoing process because ultimately the core dilemma is this fear of the unknown no one wants to be the first gazelle down to the waterhole no one that's why there's this old adage like you know sorry if anyone works at IBM but no one ever got fired for it fired for hiring IBM even if who was wrong but you definitely can if you stick your head up too high it's liable to get knocked off so when you're the first one to try something it's really really hard but there's so much value to that so when we were starting this path I would get these questions all the time from the executive team the board Kyle we're not a tech company we don't know anything about via an air guess what no one else does either and we have just as much right actually more right to be in it than any other weird startup or anybody else there's nothing that says that we can't do stuff in fact it because we have money and structure and understanding of our environment we probably have more right so building these crazy things early on was really important and then ultimately what we did was we were started from a story and these were all not all but many of the discrete artifacts that ultimately led to what's in your phone and what's in the store but we couldn't have mapped it out if we started from story because we were just figuring it out along the way the next thing I want to talk about is applying experimental design it's one thing to have a really cute story but then you have to reverse engineer what it would take to make that happen so if you believe something's going to happen in ten years what would you do right now from a make building by partnership strategy in order to not just exist but to thrive in that world and that's the reverse engineering then you take that and you break it into six-month intervals it doesn't have to be long six-month intervals and you define your hypothesis it's just like grade school your hypothesis and then you assign kpi's new KPIs to those things and then the actions you'll take before you launch your tests so one of those that we did we were doing virtual and augmented reality and we were using the applied neuroscience which was hugely hugely important and we had tested this is one measure on cognitive load so this is how much your brain is thinking and essentially what we did is we tested you want to be in the center you want to be overwhelmed or underwhelmed just want to be whelmed and in here what we would do is we tested the this in-store vignette so that weird fake kitchen or bath that everyone you know turns the knobs on it doesn't work but anyway and then we tested all over VR and AR it did much much better that might not look like a lot but that's a lot and then we tested this new thing in our partnership with Google and tango through this use of our currency and it was a phone based AR system and what we saw was they they were in the optimal state almost the entire time so then I came back to the board and I said we are going we got to go all in on phone based AR and this was completely against what the industry was saying the industry was saying oh it's virtual reality it's virtual reality but we were able to say no no no based on our KPIs this is the way to go so we actually ended up selling these phones inside of the store with no marketing or anything anyone want to guess how long it took to sell these things out a $500 smartphone at a home improvement store we sold out in four days someone people were spending $500 to spend on average $45,000 renovating their house it's a pretty good deal all because we had new KPIs we're using experimental design and story to make it happen so so if you're going to navigate the unknown having a prototype of small steps apply this experimental design and then have new KPIs what we call F KPIs future kpi's of behavior this should always be tied to human behavior right so there are three notes that I want to bring up always say no to mature metrics always you know the the the classic archetypical example of Kodak inventing the digital camera why didn't they go with a digital camera because the mature metrics of the mature business we're so much greater than this terrible new technology right but we all know what happened there you wouldn't put a pro NBA player next to a seven-year-old and say oh the seven-year-old is terrible the seven-year-olds growing up people and so why would we do that to the other one is to starve the edges say no to more money it's really easy when something's working just throw a ton of money at it don't do that try to build more partnerships and then know to mature systems don't use mature systems to to build off of and then lastly the team is really important so there are three things here to really focus on you're gonna build a transformative team- Kempe capability which is true comfort with uncertainty that those kind of people that are really uncomfortable with uncertainty are weird I am one of those people so finding those people is hard the other one is a chaos pilots like somebody who is actually good at navigating that crap it's hard and then personal transformation each person in that group needs to have their own personal narrative of how what they're doing is going to impact a larger narrative if you don't have that you're just working and waiting for somebody else to make you a better offer and then lastly finding these uncommon partnerships is critical finding people that you normally wouldn't work with if you're working if you bring up working with somebody else some weird group like Lowe's and NASA and they go low as a NASA you know you're on the right track because guess what they value what you have so much more than any of your other existing partners and you'll value what they have so much more and you can probably do a lot with very little actual cash so I know I threw a lot of you there's a lot there but luckily there's a book available that gets into this a lot more so thank you so much I really appreciate it and if Lowe's can do it you can do it too anyone can thanks

Channel: Singularity University

Views: 1,776

Rating: 4.4666667 out of 5

Keywords: Singularity University, Education, Science, leadership, technology, learning, designing thinking, future forecasting, 3D printing, AI, artificial intelligence, AR, augmented reality, VR, virtual reality, automation, biotechnology, blockchain, computing, entrepreneurship, future, futurist, futurism, future of work, future of learning, health, healthtech, medtech, fintech, nanotechnology, robotics, talks, exponential, Stockholm, Nordics, Lectures, innovation, storytelling, science fiction, cartoons, drones, space

Id: He0J38L2tuQ

Length: 43min 3sec (2583 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 09 2019