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Can You Learn To Unlearn

“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read or write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn.” Alvin Toffler, Futurist

I recently attended a talk by a South African futurist, Craig Wing, who began his talk with the quote above. Learn, unlearn and relearn. Craig walked the audience through technological megatrends that should keep every single corporate leader’s nose glued to their smartphone. To begin with, a 2014 study of the average life span of American companies on the S&P 500 Index by Standard and Poor’s yielded interesting results. In 1955 the average life span of an American company on the index was 61 years. In 2016 the average life span was 21 years and by 2027, projections based on current data estimate that the average life span would be 14 years. There is no better evidence of how this happens than outgoing Nokia CEO Stephen Elop’s quote in 2013 following the takeover of the company by Microsoft: “We didn’t do anything wrong, but somehow we lost.” The seemingly defeatist statement understated the myopic nature of the firm as it cruise controlled itself from relevance while Apple and Samsung were flat footing the accelerator in the smartphone space.

Another industry at a confluence of shifting consumer preferences and channel disruption is the retail industry. Singles Day in China falls on November 11th every year, or, more aptly 11.11 as the digit one purportedly looks like a solitary individual. The festival is a product of Chinese social culture amongst the youth to celebrate the fact that they are proud of being single. It has evolved into the biggest online shopping day in the world and a wonderful thumb up the nose to the more insular Valentine’s Day culture. Alibaba, the Chinese largest online shopping portal has registered phenomenal growth on this day alone. Sales in 2013 were US$ 5.8 billion, $9.3 billion the year after [when Facebook’s annual revenues were US$ 12.5 billion], $14.3billion in 2015 and tripling the 2013 numbers to a whopping $17.8billion in 2016. I forgot to mention one notable point: These were sales taking place within 24 hours, translating into processing numbers of 175,000 orders per second and 120,000 payments per second on their own payment platform Alipay. In the digital payments world this is the great grandmother of server challenges!

A pivotal part of Alibaba’s strategy is vertical integration, essentially ensuring a transaction gestates from an online conception into a physical delivery. Consequently 1.7 million couriers from 4,000 different retailers shipped 657 million packages out of 5,000 warehouses as a result of Singles Day 2016.
A Forbes magazine article covering the spectacular sales summarized the phenomena thus: A day in China is now bigger than a year’s online sales in Brazil.
Here’s the clincher: 82% of those sales were on smart phones!

The average life span of companies is shrinking largely due to the colossal analogue thinking that straddles boardrooms. Our “normal” as we know it no longer holds true, not when we can drive across Kenya from Mombasa to Busia carrying nothing but a toothbrush, an empty wallet and a mobile money filled phone while never lacking food, fuel and shelter.With the youth bulge that all African economies are facing, the current and future customer for a Kenyan business is more likely to be under 35 years of age, and doing most of their utility payments, banking, social interaction and entertainment off a smart phone. They are the ones who will ensure that Kenyan companies’ life spans shrink unless the corporate thinkers unlearn their current ways and relearn the rapidly shifting customer preferences. The unlearning is not only limited to customer preferences though, a highly differentiated approach will have to be taken towards the employee value proposition too. Employees are no longer in it for life, that’s been left to the KANU stalwarts. Keeping youthful talent is less a question of how much you pay, and more a debate of whether your company has a cause they believe in. Because the minute the values are diametrically opposed to what management actually does, many of these young folk walk. The question to ask yourself this week is, can you learn to unlearn?

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Dump your gadgets for your own sanity

[vc_row][vc_column width=”2/3″][vc_column_text]”This ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us.” Western Union internal memo, 1876.

I recently stumbled upon an interesting info graphic titled Future Work Skills 2020 published by the Institute For The Future. The Institute predicts six drivers or disruptive shifts that will reshape the workplace landscape. The six drivers are extreme longevity, rise of smart machines and systems, a globally connected world, a computational world, super structured organizations and, finally, new media ecology. The last three drivers are of keen interest. A computational world foresees that massive increase in sensors and processing power makes the world a programmable system. Super structured organizations assume that social technologies will drive new forms of production and value creation. New media ecology predicts that new communication tools will require new media literacies beyond text. The info graphic then aligns each of the drivers into key skills that will be needed in the future work force. Those last three drivers of interest morph into one key skill: Cognitive Load Management.

Why should this interest anyone today? In this highly connected world full of multiple distractions from various media such as smart phones, computers and digital television, it is becoming increasingly difficult to spend an hour concentrating on your work without a distracting beep from an incoming Whatsapp message, intrusive ping from an incoming email, or blinking light on your smart phone screen indicating a Facebook, Instagram or Twitter update. All these incoming distractions are like proverbial onions. You click on it only to discover another layer of data or action that needs to be peeled. You click on that data or take on that action and it reveals yet another layer of data or action that requires attention. An hour or two later and you’ve been sucked into a vortex of activity that had nothing to do with what you had been attending to before you succumbed to that seductive distraction. And your desk is still piled high with work. These distractions simply help to create a cognitive overload for the desk situated professional.

In cognitive psychology, cognitive load refers to the total amount of mental effort being used in the working memory. A colleague recently shared with me how his South African based client decided to deal with what was equivalent to an organizational cognitive overload. The organization, a financial intermediary, declared Wednesday as a no –Internet day. The email servers automatically send a standard auto-reply message that politely encourages the sender to pick up the phone and call the person they are trying to email. The message is subtle: Email is a lazy way to communicate, and going back to good old fashioned human interaction once in a while may remind one of why they are a member of a flesh and blood race. During that Wednesday, Internet is blocked for the entire organization for the entire day so there is no possibility of surfing the Internet while pretending to be busy at work. [Obviously the exception is the customer call center] The result is that employee productivity shot through the roof on Wednesdays and it is now a permanent fixture in the organizational calendar. The future world predicts that the world around us will be more interconnected leading to a higher demand for real time customer driven solutions. Our electronic gadgets at home such as fridges will be connected to our vegetable and grocery suppliers for automatic restocking, our transportation solutions be they private or public will be connected to our phones for real time traffic updates and preferred route advice, and so on. Our world will be impossible without the Internet. Our world will be driven by data. Our world as we know it, will be easier to navigate but harder to remain present and fully immersed in the moment as there will be multiple incoming data salvos in the daily battle for limited brain space. It will be as difficult to shut down office Internet as it will be to shut down an oxygen machine on a life support patient in the ICU. And therefore cognitive load management has been identified as a key skill for the 2020 workforce. Sounds easy? Have you ever seen a slow moving vehicle in front of you on a road that has minimal traffic? I now take bets with anyone who is in the car with me that if we overtake the vehicle, we will find it being driven by a middle aged male driver actively talking on a hand held mobile device. I’ve concluded, in a most non-judgmental and non-feminist manner, that middle-aged men cannot drive and hold a phone simultaneously. It is, quite simply, a cognitive train smash. Middle aged male readers, try not to get your knickers in a twist on this anecdotal finding, rather you should ask yourselves your relevance in the next 20 years in the work place. And this is for no other reason that the extreme longevity driver described above will keep workers in the work place longer and the possibility of multiple generations struggling to build cohesiveness in the same workplace will be a notable challenge. Add the fact that the generations in school today are for the most part computer savvy by the time they are ten years old and will have adapted to cognitive load management like a duck takes to water. When Western Union predicted the shortcomings of the telephone as a means to communicate in 1876, they could never, ever have predicted what that instrument would evolve into a century and a half later. It makes me start to ask: what disruptive technologies are we dismissing with a snort of ignorant derision today? Perhaps the local taxi drivers fighting Uber might be better placed to answer that.

Twitter: @carolmusyoka
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