The problem with fingerspitzengefühl, in addition to difficult pronunciation - is knowing how much data a person needs in order to maintain situational awareness without it being too much. Today we have data coming at us from every direction. In fact, as I am writing this article I was notified that my security camera detected humans at my front door. I now have situational awareness, but at the cost of distraction. What is really needed is not just any information, but information that will materially impact one's ability to succeed.Fingerspitzengefühl: The literal translation of this German word is finger tip feelings. It is used to describe one's ability to maintain situational awareness by receiving real-time data.
Layers of GIS Maps
Kevin Benedict is a TCS futurist and lecturer focused on the signals and foresight that emerge as society, geopolitics, economies, science, technology, environment, and philosophy converge.
Technologies Without Strategies
Digital Transformation Requires a Doctrine
Knights using Stirrups for Balance |
Let me support my argument by first asking a few questions. What came first e-commerce or the Internet, mobile commerce or wireless networks, commercial airline travel or the airplane, knights in shiny armour being used as shock troops, or stirrups? Answer: Stirrups of course! Innovations and technology have a long history of appearing first, and then doctrines and strategies forming later.
What we are learning is if your outdated business doctrines and strategies are dictating the speed of your technology adoptions - you are in big trouble! The world is moving much too fast and organizations must now align the tempo of their business doctrine and strategy evolution with the pace of technology innovations and customer adoptions.
"Strategy is the art of making use of time and space. I am less concerned about the latter than the former. Space we can recover, lost time never." -- Napoleon Bonaparte
A Digital Leader's Playbook
Digital Strategies |
What follows is a list of key strategies, concepts and mindsets that will help your enterprise win:
Being Faster than Real-Time is a Competitive Advantage
Competing in Future-Time |
Let’s first discuss the definitions of these times:
- Human time – time governed by our physical, biological and mental limitations as humans
- Digital time – time governed by computing and networking speeds
- Future time – time governed by predictive analytics and algorithms
Hiding from Karma in an AI World
Recently an artificial intelligence system in China successfully passed a medical exam for the first time. This is a significant advance in healthcare. Potentially AI can soon provide high quality medical diagnoses remotely anywhere around the world. Another significant step in AI and robotics happen a couple of years ago in Saudi Arabia where they granted citizenship to a robot named Sophia. I wonder if that robot will be forced to wear a burka? With all these rapid advancements, I think it is time we explore the spiritual life of robots and artificial intelligence.
Up until recently, human programmers coded and configured algorithms, AI, automation and machine learning system and took personal responsibility for all of their own code. Today, however, AI has escaped the confines of human oversight and has been empowered and employed to self-program, self-optimize, self-test, self-configure and self-learn. David Gunning writes, "Continued advances [in AI] promise to produce autonomous systems that will perceive, learn, decide, and act on their own." That's potentially a big problem for karma.
A simplistic definition of karma is a spiritual principle that teaches good actions and good intent lead to good things now and in the future, while bad actions and bad intent lead to bad things now and in the future. What happens to a human programmer that empowers or transfers responsibility for future decisions and actions to a robot - an autonomous machine with artificial intelligence? Will karma eventually seek out the original human programmer of the autonomous system, long since retired and fishing on a mountain lake to extract retribution, or direct bad karma to the machine? It's a problem.
Up until recently, human programmers coded and configured algorithms, AI, automation and machine learning system and took personal responsibility for all of their own code. Today, however, AI has escaped the confines of human oversight and has been empowered and employed to self-program, self-optimize, self-test, self-configure and self-learn. David Gunning writes, "Continued advances [in AI] promise to produce autonomous systems that will perceive, learn, decide, and act on their own." That's potentially a big problem for karma.
A simplistic definition of karma is a spiritual principle that teaches good actions and good intent lead to good things now and in the future, while bad actions and bad intent lead to bad things now and in the future. What happens to a human programmer that empowers or transfers responsibility for future decisions and actions to a robot - an autonomous machine with artificial intelligence? Will karma eventually seek out the original human programmer of the autonomous system, long since retired and fishing on a mountain lake to extract retribution, or direct bad karma to the machine? It's a problem.
Truth and Reasoning in a Pandemic Age
Leonardo Da Vinci |
Leonardo Da Vinci was the first to see clearly that knowledge of science would have to come from repeated experiments done, not unproven ideas. He was also the first scientist that correlated mathematics and science.Most people recognize the role of truth in reasoning. Reasoning without truth is like programming without logic. It doesn’t work. Computers run on logic as does nearly the entire world as a result of digital transformation. Truth and logic allow others to replicate your processes by following the logic, testing it, and debugging any issues. That is why it is so critical, in an advanced digital society, to respect and honor the value and utility of truth and logic. Without truth scientific breakthroughs and processes can’t be delivered, digital systems and economies can’t operate, and governments cannot sustain the trust and cooperation of their citizens.
Managing the Risk in Complex Global Supply Chains with Expert Padmini Ranganathan
In this episode, I interview supply chain risk and sustainability expert and SAP Ariba Global Vice President, Padmini Ranganathan. She shares her knowledge, advice and experiences with us. She also updates us on the latest trends in SCM and shares where the industry is heading. The full interview can be watched here.
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Kevin Benedict
Managing Partner, Digital Transformation, Regalix
Website Regalix Inc.
View my profile on LinkedIn
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***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.
Measuring Enterprises' Capacity for Change
Change is difficult. The default mode of most organizations and people is to resist change. It's like a helmsman who steers a ship straight into an iceberg because he doesn't want to rock the boat.
Agile businesses, however, that can redirect energy to fast and positive change and transformation can exploit many more opportunities than enterprises mired in resistance. The challenge for leaders today is to create an organization that is not only prepared and willing to change, but that also has enough energy and resources to succeed.
One of the rules of the First Law of Thermodynamics in physics is, "Energy can be changed from one form to another, but it cannot be created or destroyed.” I propose there is an application of this rule in business as well. If energy is being consumed on resisting changes to your business, then it is not available for making positive changes to your business.
If markets are changing due to economic conditions, competition, technological innovations or rapidly changing customer behaviors and preferences, then companies must be able to quickly redirect their energy to implementing positive change in order to win.
Change consumes energy, and energy is finite. That means in order to make changes to keep up with a rapidly changing market, energy must be conserved and stock piled so it is available. Expending scarce energy resisting intelligent change is a huge waste. Making investments and taking your business down a path that cannot quickly be undone if the market moves a new direction is also a big waste.
Agile businesses, however, that can redirect energy to fast and positive change and transformation can exploit many more opportunities than enterprises mired in resistance. The challenge for leaders today is to create an organization that is not only prepared and willing to change, but that also has enough energy and resources to succeed.
One of the rules of the First Law of Thermodynamics in physics is, "Energy can be changed from one form to another, but it cannot be created or destroyed.” I propose there is an application of this rule in business as well. If energy is being consumed on resisting changes to your business, then it is not available for making positive changes to your business.
If markets are changing due to economic conditions, competition, technological innovations or rapidly changing customer behaviors and preferences, then companies must be able to quickly redirect their energy to implementing positive change in order to win.
Change consumes energy, and energy is finite. That means in order to make changes to keep up with a rapidly changing market, energy must be conserved and stock piled so it is available. Expending scarce energy resisting intelligent change is a huge waste. Making investments and taking your business down a path that cannot quickly be undone if the market moves a new direction is also a big waste.
Adapting Our Minds to Perpetual Change
Customers' expectations continue to grow. They want instant, convenient, personalized, customized, predicted, recommended, rewarded and private. They want their own curated lifestyle mirrored back to them. They want control. They want mobile and fast. They desire digital experiences that are simple, consistent, beautiful and elegant. They want massive quantities of information – but in bite size quantities. They want to manage their lives from a smart phone anywhere at any time. The want to work from a coffee shop and be 100% productive.
Most of the world has already embraced the digital revolution. Our lives and behaviors are changing. The way we think and act are evolving as we integrate digital tools into our habits and processes. We constantly reach for our second brains (i.e. Wikipedia, search engines, apps) to access all of the information needed to both survive and thrive in the digital age. Our memories have been altered. We remember how to find information, rather than knowing the information itself.
These changes are rapidly impacting marketplaces, industries and even global economies. We use our smartphones for everything from meeting romantic partners, finding jobs, investing our money, ordering food, finding a ride, remembering to breathe, paying the water bill, monitoring our health, analyzing our DNA and even finding and buying our homes.
John Boyd, a renowned military strategist, taught that life is a process of adaptation, and that winners/survivors will find ways to exploit change and to adapt to it in order to survive and win. He taught that adapting and winning requires three things:
Most of the world has already embraced the digital revolution. Our lives and behaviors are changing. The way we think and act are evolving as we integrate digital tools into our habits and processes. We constantly reach for our second brains (i.e. Wikipedia, search engines, apps) to access all of the information needed to both survive and thrive in the digital age. Our memories have been altered. We remember how to find information, rather than knowing the information itself.
These changes are rapidly impacting marketplaces, industries and even global economies. We use our smartphones for everything from meeting romantic partners, finding jobs, investing our money, ordering food, finding a ride, remembering to breathe, paying the water bill, monitoring our health, analyzing our DNA and even finding and buying our homes.
John Boyd, a renowned military strategist, taught that life is a process of adaptation, and that winners/survivors will find ways to exploit change and to adapt to it in order to survive and win. He taught that adapting and winning requires three things:
- People - must be trained to think, and act in ways conducive to winning in their environment
- Ideas - learn ideas (doctrines, strategies and tactics) conducive to winning in their environment
- Things - utilize the best technologies, equipment, materials, design, etc. available to exploit change and win
The Power of Knowing
The answers to these questions were and are critical for implementing the right strategies and tactics to win. Likewise, the absence of answers to these questions are equally impactful. Leaders spend enormous amounts of time and energy defending against all the possibilities represented by a lack of data. Think about a scenario of being lost in a dark forest at night with an unknown dangerous predator lurking about. Which direction would you face? How would you defend yourself? It is difficult in the best of times, but the absence of data can make it even more excruciating!
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Interviews with Kevin Benedict
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Futurist David Espindola’s new book has just been released, "Soulful: You in the Future of Artificial Intelligence." Alex Whittin...
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I had a great time participating in the filming and development of a 10 minute film on digital twins recently. Last week was its premier at...
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In this deep dive with Munich Re (Groups) cybersecurity expert Bob Parisi, we learn how the insurance and reinsurance industry develops poli...