Does collecting more data lead to better decision-making? Competitive, data-savvy companies like Amazon, Google and Netflix have learned that data analysis alone doesn’t always produce optimum results. In this TED talk, data scientist Sebastian Wernicke breaks down what goes wrong when we make decisions based purely on data – and suggests a brainier way to use it.

I’ve noticed a sort of pattern or kind of rule, if you will, about the difference between successful decision-making with data and unsuccessful decision-making, and I find this a pattern worth sharing…

Understanding a challenge and acting on it is two different things. How can we act today to enable the company to be prosperous in the future?

The three voices that need to be in the same room

• The different voices involved can be highly engaged, all wanting to add their perspective. You have the voice of today, the manager(s) responsible for delivering todays result that are more concerned with managing the existing, maximizing returns and keeping the organization going efficiently and effectively.
• Then you have the second voice, the voice of the entrepreneur, the one eager to experiment, try out new things, explore and extend, accepting some aspects will not work
• Last we have the third voice, of the aspirant, who is looking to build a different vision, believing in different, more pioneering ways and visualiz things in their ‘mind’s eye’, far more aspirational, that can seemingly on first ‘take’ look to be totally incompatible to the reality of today.

Läs mer

Our experience from working with Swedish companies in developing their strategies, skills and mindset of working with innovation is following: They are great in facing the operational challenges of today and to discuss strategies of the distant future, but the gap in between, where the journey from today to the future will take place, many companies are lost. A methodology for working with both present, future and the time in between is Three Horizon Methodology for Innovation.

Applying the Three Horizon Methodology for Innovation

To become increasingly alert to market challenges, social shaping, emerging technology and other discoveries that might lead to new horizons, we need to connect what we do (or not do) ‘today’ with ‘possibilities’ in the future. Opportunities and challenges, often emerging, can be difficult to handle in existing organizations as they offer both conflicts and uncertainties. The way to counter concerns and handle the situation is to build an ongoing dialogue across the organization and to frame your innovation needs across the entire innovation / business portfolio.

Läs mer

There I was on the island Vis far out in the Croatian archipelago, surrounded by beautiful turquoise water to participate in a workshop about water shortage on small European islands arranged by the Water Saving Challenge Project. Once again the same ingredients; a wickedproblem, a diverse group of knowledgeable actors and the tension between holistic ambitions, and specific and localized solutions – they seem to attract my attention. Collaboration, cross-sectoral dialogues and broad participation are argued for as key measurements in almost all sustainable development policies. This seems logical given that the present complex challenges require combination of a diversity of knowledge, and multi-scale and multi-sector approaches. However, I think we have all been participating in too many workshops, discussing challenges, barriers and potentials, with a nagging feeling that it is not enough for the needed societal  transformation. I was curious to find out if the workshop at Vis could be different.

Läs mer

Did you know that the average CEO only spends about 2% of their time on long-term issues? Maybe you expected it to be more since factors like volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA) has made it so much more difficult to make decisions that leads to success in the markets of the future?

Profiting from Future Orientation

All our decisions are about the future and therefore they have to tackle the fundamental problem of its unpredictability. To make matters worse, the unpredictability increases exponentially with the length of the timeframe due to two drivers:

1. The number of factors to consider and the number of interconnections between them simply grows too large, creating so called “wicked problems”.
2. The long series of interactions make minimal changes in initial conditions cause very different outcomes due to the so called “butterfly effect”.

This may discourage investing more effort into future thinking, but at the same time research is showing that this is exactly what is needed! The positive effect of future orientation has been confirmed in several studies. One research project, for example, finds that only 6% of firms have a time-horizon longer than 5 years, but nearly all of these ranked high in business performance.

Läs mer

Elon Musk have change the car industry with Tesla, and projects like Hyper loop and SpaceX often reach the news. But in this interview he talks about how he want to change the way we build tunnels for cars by changing the tools and the requirements for the tunnel. It is interesting to see how he adress a problem and how he step-by-step working towards a solution. Look at the interview about 3D tunnels and the future for Elon Musk.

You drop the diameter by a factor of two and the cross-sectional area by a factor of four, and the tunneling cost scales with the cross-sectional area. So that’s roughly a half-order of magnitude improvement right there. Then tunneling machines currently tunnel for half the time, then they stop, and then the rest of the time is putting in reinforcements for the tunnel wall. So if you design the machine instead to do continuous tunneling and reinforcing, that will give you a factor of two improvement. Combine that and that’s a factor of eight.

The transformation into a sustainable society is one of the toughest challenges facing humanity. Even with a consensus regarding the need to decrease and prevent the negative impact on the environment, many strategic considerations remain. Choosing strategies (what should be done?) as well as tactics (how should it be done?) wisely, may significantly improve success rates. Doing the right thing has though been shown, even with the best intentions, to be very difficult. The challenge is exceptionally complex and encompasses very intricate considerations and judgements. There is a need to categorize and illustrate possible routes in a simplified way to facilitate evaluation and communication.

Analyzing potential and investments made within cleantech, two major categories surface:  sustainable technologies that are presently not profitable or competitive on their own merits and incremental improvements decreasing the negative impact of well established technologies. Läs mer

Everybody interested in, and concerned about, the now ongoing digital revolution and its impact on business, on the economy and on society should read the article; Where is technology taking the economy? The article is written by Professor W. Brian Arthur and is published in the McKinsey Quarterly October 2017.

The credibility of the article is supported by how nicely it connects to “Part I – How
technology drives economic and social transformations”
in Robert D. Atkinson´s 2004 book “The Past and Future of America´s Economy / Long Waves of Innovation that Power Cycles ofGrowth”. A book that is instrumental in order to understand the mega impacts of disruptive technology systems in general and the digital revolution in particular. For this reason is that book since a decade required reading at the Executive Program in Industrial Management at KTH EXECUTIVE SCHOOL.

Despite the limited size of the article, Professor Arthur succeeds in vividly providing the reader with:

Läs mer

New innovative idea starts with assumptions. But how do we move from assumptions to facts and business as fast as possible? Today we discuss Lean Start-up in mayor companies together with Andy Cars.

“If the rate of change on the outside exceeds the rate of change on the inside, the end is near.”

Jack Welch

Läs mer

“Think like a customer – act like an owner.”

Sales and pricing are two of the most important questions in a business. Anders Rehnberg our “sales professor” explains how this can revolutionize your offering and pricing.

Four critical issues that drive the need and urgency to improve your pricing strategy:

Läs mer