The Future of Ecosystems in Architecture, Engineering and Construction

A fascinating deep dive into the rapidly emerging world of ecosystems and digital transformation in architecture, engineering and construction. Our guest is acclaimed author, architect and Autodesk expert Olivier Lepinoy. 

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Kevin Benedict

Partner | Futurist at TCS

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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.

The Future of Our Human Experience

The world is increasingly a place that is both unfamiliar and unfriendly to our brains.  Global networks, complex digital systems, massive volumes of data, digital speeds, automated decision-making and persistent communications have all emerged this century and they are challenging the quality of our human experience. Already nearing our mind's limits to absorb change, we must quickly find ways to adapt.

The relatively slow speed of our physical and mental evolution over thousands of years seems to have been left behind in an instant by the unimaginable speed of digital evolution.  How are today's humans to adapt in only a lifetime?

It appears likely that our brains will increasingly be fed on digital stimuli.  It doesn't take a futurist to look around and see that we are all being irresistibly drawn deeper into the digital world.  The results being our future will increasingly involve our brains, and those of our children and grandchildren, being formed, influenced and sustained on digital stimuli.  Is this stimuli good for us?  Will it make us healthier and happier?

Time Passes On a One-Way Street

As a futurist, I spend my time studying the future, looking for signals that hint at what is to come.  I also invest a lot of time looking for patterns and lessons from the past that can inform our future.  The past is behind us and it's too late to change the present, so the future is our canvas - a place where we can create our artistic masterpieces.

Many people that I have interacted with pine for the past.  They wish to return to a mythical past nirvana.  The challenge of course, with that way of thinking, is time only moves one way, and it is away from the past.  It's a one-way street.  The progression of time moves like a train from the past, to the present, and on into the future.  The arrow of time points in one direction only.  In the direction of the universe's expansion.

We cannot see, touch, hear or taste time, but we can measure its passage.  Time can be marked, measured, documented and archived, but never returned to.  

The inevitable passaging of time, innocent of biases or motivations, still seems to evoke strong emotions in many.  People want to stop it.  They resent it's passing.  Many resist, trying to slow it down or even fight it.  The thing is - the future cannot be stopped, only shaped.

No one ever lives in the past.  They can only think about it.  The only place that we as humans have found inhabitable is the present.  We can, however, plan for and prepare to live in our future, which is just around the bend. 

Around the bend, is where the fruits of our labor are fully revealed.  Where the work we have done during our lifetime, can be fully realized in future generations.   It is here where we will finally understand that future people matter.

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Kevin Benedict

Partner | Futurist at TCS

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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.

Presentist vs. Futurist

Kevin Kelly, the founding executive editor of Wired magazine, has published several lists of lessons he has learned over his lifetime.  One of the most interesting lessons was, "Forget trying to predict the future, we are still trying to predict the present."  As a Futurist I understand Kelly's point!  Perhaps it is time to create the role of Presentist.

As we have all experienced with the global COVID-19 pandemic, it is all but impossible to understand or predict something while you are in the midst of it.  It takes distance, it takes hindsight.  Small changes to the COVID-19 virus can result in variants that exhibit different levels of severity and transmissibility.  Scientist don't know the future until both time and data reveal the patterns.

Along this line, Winston Churchill once said, "The further backward you look, the further forward you can see."  Another voice of experience suggesting it takes a different perspective, often involving both time and distance to reveal the patterns that may impact our future.

One of the notable values of machine learning is the ability to find patterns that were once invisible to humans.  For example, intelligence agencies today, utilize what is called "activity based intelligence.  This is the ability to use UAVs (drones) or other sensors in persistent surveillance to monitor the daily activities and movements of an area as big as a small city.  These observations can then be labeled, analyzed by ML, and tracked over a period of time to discover patterns and identify anomalies to the patterns.  

Discovered anomalies can be important.  For example, why did multiple bad guys with no known connection to each other, from several different locations, all converge on one warehouse during the night and leave together in four cargo trucks?  This is an anomaly worthy of further investigation.

This brings us back to Kevin Kelly's lesson.  Forget trying to predict the future, because we can't even predict the present without more time, data and distance.  Learn from the patterns of the past, and use them to recognize today's anomalies that will influence and alter the patterns of the future.  

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Kevin Benedict

Partner | Futurist at TCS

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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.

Looking Elsewhere for a Dependable Future

For most of recorded history not many things were dependable.  Crops were not dependable. Communications were not dependable.  Transportation was not dependable.  Logistics were not dependable.  Income was not dependable. Health was not dependable.  We had yet to domesticate the gods of science and nature to serve our ends.

Today, we can routinely move through complex environments with dependable transportation systems that involve millions of moving parts without so much as spilling our coffee, looking up from a game of Wordle, or being late to a meeting.   This amazing accomplishment, and others like it, have freed up our brains and provided us with the luxury of focusing our attention elsewhere - and elsewhere is an important place.  It's where the future is made.

Our mental "elsewhere" can be a place of hope, joy, compassion, peace, beauty, love, generosity, community, creativity, innovation, trust and exploration.  It can also, depending on our circumstances, be a place of darkness filled with grievances, misery, hopelessness, conspiracies, anger, bitterness and resentment.  Since elsewhere is where we go to think about and design our future, it is critical that it be a healthy place both mentally and emotionally.  All of our building blocks of the future will be biased by the mental and emotional states we are in at the time of development.  They will also be biased by our perceived reality.

The challenge we all face as humans is effectively guiding our thoughts and emotions to ensure we plan our futures from the "elsewhere" where we can dependably appeal to "the better angels of our nature," to quote Abraham Lincoln.   The future is one very important reason we should be focused on the mental and emotional health of ourselves and the communities around us.

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Kevin Benedict

Partner | Futurist at TCS

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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.

How Humans Learned to See the Future

If you have never read a book by or listened to a presentation by Futurist Byron Reese you have missed out.  He is a popular speaker and holds several technology patents, he has started and sold multiple companies, including two NASDAQ IPOs.  He has authored 4 books: Infinite Progress, The Fourth Age, Wasted, and his newest book that will be available in August of 2022 - Stories, Dice and Rocks that Think, and he has another in development.  

I love the work Byron does.  He is bold, deeply insightful, humble, immensely creative and shares his contagious sense of humor with all of us on the program today. Stories, Dice, and Rocks That Think: How Humans Learned to See the Future--and Shape It Learn more: https://www.amazon.com/Stories-Dice-Rocks-Think-Future/dp/1637741340/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3PODGJKLWX8FT&keywords=byron+reese&qid=1654809999&s=books&sprefix=byron+reese%2Cstripbooks%2C189&sr=1-1

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Kevin Benedict

Partner | Futurist at TCS

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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.

Transforming Healthcare with TCS Experts Stuart Gilchrist and Smriti Kirubanandan

We are excited to release the first episode in our new HLTH FORWARD series hosted by myself and healthcare expert Smriti Kirubanandan.  Our guest for our first program is healthcare expert Stuart Gilchrist.  He brings with him 37 years of experience working on all aspects of healthcare.  He shares his journey and how the healthcare industry has evolved over his career, what it means to be an industry leader today, and where healthcare is going in the future.

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Kevin Benedict

Partner | Futurist at TCS

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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.

The Future of the Home with Futurist Alex Whittington

In this episode of the Future of Business, futurist Alex Whittington and I share our pandemic experiences living and working at home with our families for the past 2-years.  We then explore her research into the future of homes, and ponder how our pandemic experiences might change the way homes are designed in the future.

You can jump to specific questions and answers below.

Q1: In the vortex of this pandemic, tell me how your personal life changed. A1: 1:19 Q2: Did you do anything to accommodate moving your work all online? A2: 3:10 Q3: What do you think are some of those lasting influences on society that we’re going to leave this pandemic with? A3: 4:55 Q4: How do you think houses themselves, going forward, will change? A4: 11:21 Q5: How might our idea of entertainment and life with a family in a home change? A5: 16:07 Q6: If we start with a brand new home, how do you think that will change given our pandemic experiences? A6: 21:21 Q7: You were talking about unschooling, as a philosophy or concept, share that with us... A7: 24:45 Q8: You also write about co-living and co-working spaces, what have you learned about that? A8: 27:52 Q9: Let’s say you were buying an older home, what are some of the things that you would change to accommodate what we have learned during the pandemic years? A9: 31:47

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Kevin Benedict

Partner | Futurist at TCS

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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.

Navigating to the Future

The problem with the future lies in its navigation system.  Let me explain.  In my Jeep’s navigation system, I put in my destination and it efficiently proposes routes (preferably over mountains and rivers. The future, however, uses different inputs.  It takes inputs from innovations in science and technology, and mixes them with developments in the societal, geopolitical and economic domains, adds fast changing consumer preferences and behaviors, VC investments, profit motivations, and then sprinkles in some additional earth-shaking catalysts like depressions, wars, pandemics, insurrections, and economic crisis.  Where will that navigation system take us?  Who knows!?  You can see why it’s a fool’s errand to make predictions about the future.

The future’s navigation system is either broken, or we just don’t know how to use it.  It seems to lack a key field – a destination field.  A field where we can specify a place we want to go where humans flourish, develop in healthy ways, in a favorable environment and that is filled with abundance and joy.  If we can find that input field, we should add that destination!

Many of us have given up on navigating to our desired future.  We’ve stopped trying and turned our attention to learning how to best react to whatever comes along on the road to nowhere.  As chaotic and complex as our world is, that still doesn’t seem to be our best option.  As stewards of our civilization and our children’s future, it seems having a desired destination where humans flourish, and choosing the most efficient, equitable and safe routes to get us there would still be in everyone’s best interest.

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Kevin Benedict

Partner | Optimistic Futurist at TCS

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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.

Innovation for the Purpose of Human Flourishing

We are drawn to profits like a moth to a flame.  Although the window of opportunity for humans to flourish may be open, we turn away away away to chase the dollar.

We have lived through the invention, innovation and evolution of social media which could have united us in friendship, kindness, love, and compassion, but used it to create social conflict, agitation, divisiveness, disinformation, mistrust, depression in our kids, and to weaken our democracy and diminish our ability to respond to a global pandemic with a unified front.  All for the purpose of generating increasing profits.

We are witnessing the deployment of low-cost lethal drones that can swarm, follow, and attack a person silently from the air using artificial intelligence, facial recognition, and lethal weapons.   These are developed and sold in the pursuit of profits.  Profits don’t respect borders, and these technologies will soon be available to be purchased by all - a fearful thought.

The Future of Climate Risk with Expert Stephen Bennett

Each of us are experiencing the effects of extreme weather, so I reached out to Stephen Bennett, the Chief Climate Officer and Co-Founder of The Demex Group to learn how businesses and markets should strategically think about and adapt to them. A fascinating interview!

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Kevin Benedict

Partner | Futurist at TCS

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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.

An Optimistic Futurist

At any given moment, there are events within our control and out of our control.  There are areas we can influence, and areas we cannot.  As an optimistic futurist, I read and analyze the positive with the negative, and then I seek opportunities to influence a positive outcome. 

The global COVID-19 pandemic is a timely point of reference.  I read all the distressing news and projections like everyone else, and then look for opportunities to both mitigate the risk and to achieve the best possible outcomes.  

Imagine if you would sitting in a canoe full of your dearest family members.  The canoe is drifting quickly toward a dangerous waterfall.  Our choices are to focus on all the possible negative future scenarios of going over the waterfall, or focusing on influencing a positive outcome.  What will it be?

We need the clarity and wisdom of recognizing all the possible negative scenarios and consequences, but once we have that recognition, we should focus on shaping the outcome to something purposely positive.  Wouldn’t you agree?  Some might say futurist are better off being objective spectators, but I want a futurist to throw me a rope.

Doomsday futurist are often secretly hopeful they’ve got it right.  They sit back and wait for the canoe to go over the waterfall...as they predicted.  Optimistic futurist, identify, reverse engineer and rehearse both positive and negative possible future scenarios to learn what needs to be done today to purposefully influence our path to achieve the best possible outcome.

Future

My Futurist boss here at TCS, Frank Diana, always says, “It is impossible to predict the future - anyone who tries is on a fool's errand.”  There are simply too many building blocks of the future including, science, technology, societal, geopolitical and economic converging together, plus catalysts of change (think pandemic), mixed into this giant pot of stew we call the future.  Exactly what comes out can be guessed at, but not predicted.  At best we can identify a range of possible and plausible future scenarios to consider and rehearse. 

Given that we can’t predict the future - let’s identify the future we want and do everything possible and purposeful to achieve it.

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Kevin Benedict

Partner | Futurist at TCS

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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.

The Future is Where Everything Happens!

A rip current is a strong flow of water that pulls floating objects out to sea before dissipating in deeper water.  Swimmers who are caught in a rip current often panic and exhaust themselves by trying to swim directly against the flow of water, rather than with it.  The future is not unlike a rip current.  If you fight against the future you will exhaust yourself and ultimately fail.  

Change is uncomfortable, and time brings change.  Many people have a deep resentment against time and all the changes it brings.  These people often look at the future with dread.  All they can see coming is a rising tsunami of change and discomfort - physical, mental and emotional.  They point to today's problems as examples of what yesterday's future brought, and they don't want any more of it.  Often, people don't realize that the seeds of the changes we see today were planted long ago.  It is the past that brought us to today - for good and for bad.

It is the season of planning.  We are all busy looking ahead and planning for 2022.  The reason I get so excited about the future is we can influence it for good.  We can improve upon the past.  It's our opportunity for a next version - a version 2.0.  We can't change the past, but the future is our's.  What is our life's purpose anyhow, if it is not to build a better tomorrow?

Innovating, inventing, planning, creating, designing, developing, growing, starting, birthing and building are all future oriented terms.  They point to what is to come.  The future is a new place.  Let's bring forward from the past all that is good and improve on the bad.  Let's all work together for good so the future can be our gift to generations to come.

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Kevin Benedict

Partner | Futurist at TCS

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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.

Winning with Speed and Fridays

"The size of competitors and the longevity of their brands, are less predictive of future success than the importance they give to data, the speed in which they act upon the data, and their operational tempo." 

In 2013 the volume of data created, captured, copied and consumed worldwide totaled approximately 9 zetabytes.  This year the total will be 79 zetabytes.  By 2025 there is projected to be 181 zetabytes of data.  Inside these fast growing masses of data are the answers all businesses need to succeed.  The data tells them what their customers want.  It tells them the prices customers are willing to pay.  It tells them when the products are most in demand.  This data, however, has a shelf life that rapidly diminishes over time just as consumers change their preferences with the changing seasons.  It is up to every business to be able to exploit the data fast enough to be meaningful.

In an always-connected world where consumers and their needs are transient, timing is everything.  In order to capture competitive advantages and contextual relevance before the shelf life of the data expires, enterprises must deploy optimized information logistics systems (OILS) and lean on AI to help analyze and process fast enough to deliver value.

In digital interactions with customers today, they expect instant access to information.  IT infrastructures must be able to support these real-time interactions, and this need requires we solicit the help of AI and our robot friends.  It also takes rethinking business models, organizational structures, decision-making and business processes.  It requires new ways of operating, employee training, and often automation and our own robot Fridays.  

In Daniel Defoe's 1719 novel, Robinson Crusoe, Crusoe rescues a native from cannibals and names him Friday after the day in which they met.  The native stays with him and ultimately becomes a highly valuable companion to Crusoe.  If not already, we will soon all need robot Fridays (aka automation) to help process data and information fast enough to support these real-time interactions.  The following list is what digital winners invest in:

1. Optimizing their information logistics systems
2. Implementing effective sense and respond systems (IoT, IIoT, automated data collection systems, sensors, customer experience monitoring etc.)
3. Utilizing automation to gain speed, predictability and quality 
4. Achieving real-time and future time business operational tempos
5. Increasing cultural agility
6. Using contextual relevance to personalize digital user interactions and experiences in real time

The purpose of these investments is to capture the value of data fast enough to gain competitive advantages through fast decision-making and delivering the best possible customer experiences.  Speeds should be maximized in the following 6 areas to accomplish these goals:

1. IT systems
2. Business processes
3. Decision-making
4. Business alignment/transformation
5. Customer alignment
6. Cultural alignment 

Businesses that embrace hyper-digital transformation will optimize their organizational structures and business models to support the operational tempos demanded by customers.  By tempos we mean the speed at which the organization must operate to compete successfully.  Digital consumers demand real-time responses - rightly so.  To support real-time responses requires an enterprise to move beyond “human time” and into the realm of “digital time”.

  
Humans are biological entities that operate at a pace governed by our biology, the sun, moon, and the physical requirements that keep our carbon-based bodies alive.  These requirements and mental limitations make scaling human productivity beyond the limits of the Circadian Rhythm impossible without augmentation.  Augmentation takes the form of a robot Friday - automation, artificial intelligence, machine learning and algorithms.  Robot Fridays have the advantage of being able to work 24x7x365, and don’t as yet ask for holidays and sick days.

Once the business is running in digital time, the challenge becomes business agility.  Agility is the speed at which a business can recognize, analyze, react and profit from rapidly changing market conditions. Businesses that can accurately understand customer demand, and the strategies of their competition, and then respond faster will soon dominate those, which are slower.  The military strategist John Boyd called these competitive advantages, “getting inside of your competitor’s decision and response curves.”  This means your actions and responses are occurring at a pace that surpasses your competitions’ ability to understand and react.

To succeed today leaders must have a business capable of competing.  They must develop a company culture where change is viewed as an opportunity.  They must transform their businesses to operate at real-time tempos and move beyond “human-time” limitations to algorithm and automation supported “digital-time.”  They must understand that rapidly changing consumer behaviors mandate companies operate in a more agile manner capable of rapid responses to new opportunities and competitive threats.

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Kevin Benedict

Partner | Futurist at TCS

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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.

Convergence, Combinations and Challenges in the Future

I first read about futurist Frank Diana's concept of combinatorial technologies several years ago. He wrote, "We are seeing exponential convergence across the areas of science, technology, economics, society, ethics, and politics. The combinatorial nature of an overwhelming number of building blocks drives an accelerating intersection across these areas.  As an expert Lego player, I can appreciate the concept of building blocks, and the near infinite number of combinations these blocks can be used to form.  The idea that we have now reached a critical mass of digital building blocks, and that we are now experiencing exponential growth through the combinatorial nature of them is compelling.

The World Economic Forum described the future in similar ways, “We stand on the brink of a technological revolution that will fundamentally alter the way we live, work, and relate to one another. In its scale, scope, and complexity, the transformation will be unlike anything humankind has experienced before... Billions of people are now connected by mobile devices, with unprecedented processing power, storage capacity, and access to knowledge.  And these possibilities are being multiplied by breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, robotics, the Internet of Things, autonomous vehicles, 3D printing, nanotechnology, biotechnology, materials science, energy storage, and quantum computing."

Both of these quotes, and the idea that we have reached a new era as a result of the combinatorial nature of digital building blocks, begs the question of what does this mean for our organizations today?  The answers can be found in the simple Lego block.

Legos come in standardized shapes, sizes and integration points that allow for us to rapidly build billions of different combinations.  The standardization of Lego blocks doesn't restrict our ability to create new and unique combinations, rather it enhances it. 

We must all recognize that the winners of today and tomorrow are not organizations that create their own bespoke building blocks, but rather the ones that have a vision to use standardized digital building blocks to offer unique combinations faster than their opponents.  That is where ecosystems play a role.

Ecosystems often form around a digital platform.  Think about the Amazon ecosystem.  Hundreds of different kinds of businesses and services have formed to take advantage of the building blocks Amazon has already developed and made available.

The future is impossible to predict, but as mentioned earlier we do know that it will consist of the convergence of science, economics, society, ethics, and politics and a whole lot of different combinations of existing and new technologies.  Our challenge is to watch for the signals that will help us recognize which possible future scenarios are developing and which are fading.  

As we watch these possible future scenarios, it is helpful to practice a sense and respond approach.  Sense how possible future scenarios are evolving and respond and plan accordingly.

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Kevin Benedict

Partner | Futurist at TCS

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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.

Transparency and Swarming are Both Good and Bad for Businesses

Sleepy communities are suddenly overrun with people moving in from out of town.  Roads and traffic signals designed to accommodate low volumes of traffic are suddenly insufficient.  Hidden fishing holes are now surrounded by cars, families, dogs and campers.  Trail systems are overrun.  Birders swarm a quiet neighborhood causing traffic congestion and concern.  All of these swarming scenarios unfold so quickly they surprise us.  

What has caused these "sudden" swarms.  I am sure there are many different possibilities, but instant communication, search engines, social media, online and real-time data analytics and market transparency, plus our increasing desire for new and better experiences, wealth, and our ability to work from home anywhere all play a role.  Because of all these reasons and more we all are swarming more often.  

We swarm to new TV shows.  We swarm to new music.  We swarm to picturesque mountain villages.  We swarm to newly Instagram "discovered" trails, rivers, beaches, restaurants, mountains, neighborhoods and resorts.   Swarming can cause chaos.  It can upend communities overnight.  Housing prices can skyrocket.  Labor, materials and other resources can all suddenly become more expensive as a result of unexpectedly swarming-caused high demand.

Swarming seems to be a byproduct of the internet and social media platforms.  We are all connected on platforms that aggregate and centralize information, both true or false, at speeds never before imagined.  We swarm to grab toilet paper, some swarm to march on the capital, others swarm to a Frye Festival.

Swarming can have both good and bad effects on businesses.   If your organization represents something inspiring and positive, consumers may swarm to purchase your products leaving you without enough product.  If your company or leaders gain a reputation for mistreating humans, animals or for destructive environmental practices then customers may suddenly disappear leaving warehouses full of unsold products.

Swarming happens because of visibility to information, and in today's world nothing remains hidden for long.  We live in a transparent world where information, the internet, smartphone photos, social media and search engines, and data breaches all guarantee the "transparency effect" will also impact our world and our businesses.  Even the most secretive organizations like the NSA experience data breaches.

Transparency and swarming can cause chaos in a business.  The most well thought out plans and strategies can be turned upside down by one Twitter post showing how your supply chain includes a third tier supplier using child labor in a remote factory.  Transparency can be a very good motivator to not only promote your purpose-driven ambitions, but to actually become a practitioning purpose-driven organization.

In this article, I argue that as a result of both the "transparency effect" and the "swarming effect," companies today require a Chief Values Officer to ensure that the business and the leaders of the business follow admirable practices that align with their public statements, and that the "transparency effect" and the "swarm effects" will benefit the business, not destroy it. 

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Kevin Benedict

Partner | Futurist at TCS

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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.

The Future of Human Experiences (HX)

I have a confession.  Although my family would have been considered working poor (my dad worked odd jobs in construction, sawmills and factories), I was able to attend a university, pay my tuition by working on a dairy farm and graduate.  This ultimately opened doors to membership among the "elite" by way of a college degree and a job with a living wage.  

It is easy to forget the struggles of one's past when life has moved on.  It's easy to assume our personal experiences are representative of most.  My recent research, however, has revealed this to be untrue.  In many parts of America, there are macro and micro-economic forces and trends that are negatively impacting life opportunities, careers, hope and the quality of the human experience.

When a customer complains of bad customer service, how should the business respond?  Apologize, empathize and ensure it doesn't happen again.  If businesses ignore these complaints they will quickly suffer the results.  It's not too dissimilar when it comes to leading and/or governing constituents.  Citizens also have experiences on a spectrum of good to bad.  These human experiences make up a person's quality of life and are critically important to them.  

Businesses cannot thrive, if their customers aren't thriving.  Countries can't thrive, if their citizens are not thriving.  What follows is a look at the human experience from the perspective of the less educated and underemployed workers in America.

First, we cannot begin to understand the minds and actions of large numbers of American workers without first understanding there are two different Americas, one made up of a less educated or under-employed workforce suffering through deindustrialization, economic pain, reduced opportunities and community decay, while the other consists of highly educated, advantaged and elite individuals experiencing rapid wage increases and fortuitous and abundant career opportunities. 

For many Americans, deindustrialization has reduced the quality of their human experience.  Many experience delayed and strained marriages, broken and delayed families, poor physical and mental health, addictions, diminished local economies, and even a reduced sense of worth, status, purpose and hope.  What is causing these declines in fortune?  Let’s take a look at deindustrialization, technological innovations and some additional variables that have worked symbiotically to create these unfortunate human experiences.

The Role and Future of Information with Futurist Alex Whittington

In this deep dive discussion with the brilliant thinker and futurist Alex Whittington, we explore the topics of data monetization, social media, facts, information/disinformation and the future of data driven economic models.  I hope you enjoy!  

To watch or listen to more of these interviews with insightful futurist, business and technology leaders please remember to follow us or subscribe!

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Kevin Benedict

Partner | Futurist | Leadership Strategies at TCS

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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.

Reimagining Higher Education with Professor Jack Shannon and Futurist Frank Diana

In this compelling episode we take a deep dive with futurist Frank Diana and Professor Jack Shannon into the future of children, the future of work and the future of higher education.  We then discuss how the pandemic and emerging technologies have impacted all of them and explore what possible future scenarios may look like.

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Kevin Benedict

Partner | Futurist | Leadership Strategies at TCS

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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.

Twitching Professors, Outsourced Parenting, Digital Transformation and the University Experience

“Even our custodians have a role to play in transforming our students,” explained Dr. Jack Crumbly of Tuskegee University, when describing the value of the “university experience.” The future is about “universities without borders,” predicted Dr. Marek Kowalkiewicz, a professor who studies Twitch gamers to improve his digital classroom teaching experience.  “It’s really about what the students want, and what those business models look like,” added Dr. Bill Griffiths, a professor with 52-years of educational experience.  These are just a few of the comments I recorded over the past few weeks while interviewing professors in higher education.

I noted four particular findings from my interviews and research:

1. It’s about the experience of learning and growing in a community focused on higher education

2. Universities must deliver for both students and parents

3. The importance of mentors, professors and engagement 

4. New players and business models are impacting the future of higher education

What does a “university experience” mean to an eighteen-year-old? Independence?  Relationships?  Parties?  Personal growth?  New friends?  New beginnings?  Escape?  YES!  To parents it may mean something completely different like - HELP!  Help me transform this obstinate teenager into an employable, self-sufficient, and responsible adult. No matter what the student’s or parent’s goals are, it will be difficult for these to be accomplished alone on a laptop in the family basement.  

Repeatedly in my interviews and discussions with professors the value and importance of an immersive learning and growing experience within a university community was emphasized.  It was my impression as a result of these discussions, that many of us underestimate the personal growth that takes place as part of the “university experience,” and focus too much on the acquired skills and degrees aspect.  Degrees can be achieved through multiple channels, but personal growth takes a purposeful village.

Online education has been around long enough that the basics are well understood.  The difficulties remain the ability to provide engagement and social connections for students in a digital environment.  Helping students feel a part of a supportive university community and a member of something important and meaningful is critical, and not easily done in digital only environments.  More work and focus are needed in this area.

If a student is just interested in acquiring skills and getting employed, companies like Google are now offering online classes that are treated as equal to university classes.  If a person successfully passes these Google courses, Google is willing to hire them without a university education.  The student, although potentially employable, will miss out on the personal growth and “university experience.”  It seems to me our communities will be less for it.

All three professors I interviewed last week mentioned the value of mentorship, guidance and advise that professors can provide when there are opportunities to form close relationships on a physical campus.  “Not all students come to us with backgrounds that enable them to easily understand a subject’s context,” Dr. Crumbly shared.  A professor working closely with a student can quickly recognize this context challenge and can help them remediate it.

Professors and instructors of all kinds are powerful professional contacts as well.  When resumes are thin, a good referral from a trusted professor can be just what a student needs to gain a foot in the door of a career opportunity.

It seems to me that the Covid-19 pandemic is helping to spotlight and clarify the required technical deliverables now and in the future for higher education.  Digital technologies should be used to enhance the “university experience” for students, parents and university staff, while providing opportunities for social engagement.  Digital platforms are valuable as a way of protecting students and staff during times of danger, they can remove geographic barriers, eliminate scheduling conflicts, reduce travel and parking issues and provide additional and alternative learning channels.

Watch "Higher Education and Pandemic Induced Digital Transformation" with Dr. Marek Kowalkiewicz, Part 1 and Part 2 on YouTube now.

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Kevin Benedict

Partner | Futurist | Leadership Strategies at TCS

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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.