HumanCentric

Technology Fails Unless it Means Something to Someone

Mike Saunders

• Publisher: Tracey McDonald Publishers
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780639992969
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Marketing digitale
• Index: Business

Digital is not a technological conversation; it's a people conversation.

The heart of Mike Saunders' exciting new book, HumanCentric, is how to build a successful business in the Fourth Industrial Revolution while focusing on human stakeholders.

Never before have we had so much information so readily available at our fingertips and there is no doubt that acceleration of innovation and the velocity of disruption underpinning the Fourth Industrial Revolution are having a major impact on businesses. Is it realistic to be at the forefront of these disruptive forces? Is it even necessary? It most certainly is.

Knowledge of these disruptive forces – notably mobile, social, the Internet of Things, data and blockchain – equips us to build our businesses in the change that is enveloping us, but we need a framework to help us understand how to operate in a new revolution, how to organise the chaos into success.

It is this framework to which Mike has been applying his mind for the last ten years and in this book he presents just such a model to help us to navigate the digital world and build value in a humancentric way.

The four concepts of his model are explore, ideate, intersect and create and he unpacks each of them in detail and with crystal-clear clarity, while never losing sight of the human element so essential to ensuring success in an ever-evolving world.

With his wide experience both locally and internationally, and his success in running the highly respected DigitLab, as well as his passion for sharing knowledge, Mike is uniquely positioned to share a complete framework for human-centred digital transformation.

Our role in life is not to become digital. Instead, it is how to succeed in a digital world.

partone

CHALLENGE ACCEPTED

The Challenge We Face

Yesterday I woke up as Stacey gently placed my fourteen-month-old on the bed next to me. It was Father’s Day and Stacey had brought Benson for some good morning cuddles before we started our day. Always a special moment full of human connection and emotion as Bennie slowly wakes up and gets moving.

A few minutes later Zac, my seven-year-old, appears for his morning cuddles. However, his are slightly different. Zac is always excited to prey on my slow wake-up process by suggesting he play games on the iPad instead of bugging me to wake up and make breakfast. We limit iPad time in our house, so Zac loves to make the most of my weak sleepy state every Saturday and Sunday morning.

Next step. Wake up, shower, dress the kids, pack the car with the baby pram, presents, snacks and children. Roughly 45 minutes later Stace and I are on our way to the shopping centre to enjoy a family breakfast to celebrate Father’s Day. We don’t normally do breakfast in shopping centres; we find them a bit dull and artificial. However, we had picked this centre because of the night before.

It was about 9pm and we were busy with some urgent work for our business when Stacey’s MacBook Air crashed after a system update glitched. We booked the machine in for repairs online and changed our day’s plans to work around the repairs.

Back to Father’s Day, we settle our kids at the restaurant and order breakfast. I then take the laptop upstairs and drop it off at the technician for repairs and rejoin my family for breakfast. Breakfast with kids is not the most relaxing exercise but it is one that is full of emotion. We go from loving gestures and commenting on how beautiful our family is, to frustration that the kids aren’t eating and complaining how stressed we are as we try to balance work and parenting commitments. In the midst of this emotional roller coaster we manage to fill our stomachs and our hearts during this quality family time.

Breakfast is now done; we do a bit of shopping and then head over and collect the repaired laptop.

Next, we pack the kids into the car again and head out on a 90-minute drive to a family lunch with Stacey’s family. Our hope and dream is that Bennie will sleep on the way and arrive at lunch feeling happy with life. Things weren’t going to plan, and Bennie seemed adamant that he was not tired. I pulled out my phone, connected it to the car sound system and started playing a playlist on iTunes called ‘Relax’. About three minutes later Bennie is fast asleep and we take a slow drive up to Howick.

We spent a lovely afternoon with family chatting while the kids played together. While catching up, we had a bunch of activities that were happening in the background. We took photos, edited them, shared them with each other over WhatsApp. We had people responding to messages from work and even had a few moments of searching Google for answers to questions that rose in our conversations.

All in all, this was dubbed a great family day and we all left refreshed. On the way home Stacey spent the time entertaining the kids in the back seat and uploading/editing photos to share on Instagram.

So there you have a window into a day in our lives. I suppose it’s not too much different to a day in your life. What I find so interesting is how technology has been completely embedded into our lives. At times it feels like it’s unwelcome and other times we hardly realise it’s there.

On Father’s Day we did a number of technology-driven activities that dictated how our day went.

•Zac kept himself entertained for a while on the iPad

•I was given great gifts, half of which were bought from an online store

•We used an online booking form to fix our laptop

•We were notified that our laptop was ready via SMS

•We used a self-service kiosk to pay for our parking

•We used Bluetooth and a music subscription service to soothe Bennie to sleep

•We took a ton of photos of our family on our phones and camera

•We wirelessly transferred those camera photos onto our phones

•I edited my photos in Lightroom

•I shared my favourite pics with the family via WhatsApp

•Stacey likes editing her photos directly on Instagram

•Our whole family used WhatsApp throughout the day to keep in touch with other people and responsibilities

•And, finally, at the end of the day I set my phone alarm to wake me up the next morning

It is this ubiquitous nature of technology and the way people seem to use it so happily that has driven the desire for every single business to use technology to become more powerful.

We would love our business to be the next Uber, Facebook, Google Maps, Instagram or Amazon. However, it becomes increasingly difficult to compete against these giants who seem to be in a completely different league as they enjoy large amounts of our customers’ attention and time.

Business today chases technology like it’s a magic genie that will solve their problems, find their customers and improve their sales. Unfortunately, most of the time businesses have an unhappy experience that loses them money and becomes an unused infrastructure with so much untapped potential.

It’s a frustrating experience for everyone involved, especially as we enter a Fourth Industrial Revolution that promises us that our investment in technology will give us a great return.

Today we stand at a precipice, understanding that technology can project our business forward but surrounded by a graveyard of failed experiments that seem to be telling a different story.

I have been standing on this precipice for the last 15 years, working in business and trying to use technology to meet our business targets and demands. I have worked as a consultant, tackling the same problems, and then went on to start a Digital Solutions Agency, DigitLab.

At DigitLab I have walked many journeys with start-ups, corporate business and SMEs. I have seen incredible successes on one hand, and on the other I have carried incredible losses. As an entrepreneur I have built innovative, groundbreaking solutions that have failed; I have also had great successes in business.

The last decade has been an incredible learning environment to see what it takes to build a business in the Fourth Industrial Revolution and this book will share the outcome of these experiences. While I would love to share my actual experiences, I simply cannot divulge that kind of intelligence about my clients. But in this book I do want to create the opportunity to share a framework and model that we have developed to help business succeed in a digital age.

To this end, I am using an ob...