A few months before he passed away, Clayton Christensen said at an interview in November 2019, that we are trained to select data, analyse it and make decisions; however, data belongs to the past. We have no data of the future at all.
Some decades ago, when the velocity of transformation of the environment was reasonably slow, we could make projections taking data from the past. Based upon such data we could start working and designing new products and services with some success. Little by little, the velocity of said transformation increased and in most cases, we didn’t even realise it and therefore did not understand why the success of new launches slowed.
Currently, we find ourselves in a crisis, and as in any crisis, transformation has accelerated around us.
From the sociological and corporate perspective, this time is becoming quite interesting. Permanent and radical alteration of the rules of the game and leaders of many organisations have made decisions which led me to reflections such as:
- When the crisis erupted, a great amount of companies focused on their treasury by applying predictive logic, and still today, they are acting as if this situation has a specific deadline from which everything will return to the way it was before.
- Let’s take as an example the organisers of congresses and conventions which is premised on gathering lots of people in reduced spaces (a lust party for Covid)…