When leaders are looking at how to get the most out of new technologies they will inevitably be faced with a plethora of options, questions, and prioritisation decisions. Making sense of how to navigate that (and how to navigate the dilemma zone in particular) can be a huge challenge.
One of my favourite ways of thinking about the opportunity that can be created by new technology is to use nature’s own metaphor for change – metamorphosis. There are, of course, two kinds of metamorphosis: incomplete and complete. Each of these speaks to a very different process of change, and gives us an analogy for a different approach for deriving value from new technology. This is the opportunity inherent in optimisation and transformation.
Optimisation: the grasshopper above is a good example of incomplete metamorphosis. A mature grasshopper still looks like an immature grasshopper but it sheds it’s skin as it grows larger. Here the process is to grow, get bigger, better and faster. Similarly, there is huge value in using new technologies to optimise – to make stuff more efficient or faster, to make it easier to grow or to scale. Incomplete metamorphosis is a good analogy for the value in applying new technology to optimise.
Yet sometimes the opportunity is more significant than just taking what was there before and doing it better or faster. Sometimes we need to think bigger, or think differently in order to truly capitalise on the value. This is transformation.
Transformation: The caterpillar and the butterfly is complete metamorphosis. This gives us a good analogy for what needs to happen when new technology creates entirely new possibilities (products, services, processes). The ‘messy middle’ stage of complete metamorphosis involves the pupa, where everything dissolves into a kind of biological soup before being reconstructed as something very different, a beautiful butterfly.
So it is with transformative technology. It creates wholly different possibilities but to get there we need to unlearn existing assumptions and there is likely to be plenty of uncertainty as we work out how to get the most out of what’s now possible. This may well involve the reinvention and redesigning of business models, processes, structures, ways of working and more. The risk with this type of change is that we don’t think big enough. This is second order, not first order change. It’s easy to look at the new through the lens of the old and not to realise that we need to challenge embedded assumptions. We need to avoid mourning the caterpillar and celebrate becoming the butterfly.
Optimisation and transformation. Making smart decisions around the potential of new technology is about understanding where we need to optimise and where we need to transform.
This post is an updated version of something I first wrote about 3 years ago.
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