For this first episode of 2017 I wanted to offer you something a bit different. Last year I was fortunate enough to deliver the opening keynote at HR Tech Fest in Johannesburg. My topic was the dual role I feel HR needs to play in the digital transformation of business. It was quite a personal presentation for me as I shared some of the lessons that I’ve learned from the 20 years of my career I have spent being digital disruptive in several different industries.
The conference organizers, The Eventful Group, made an audio recording of the presentation which I’m delighted to share with you as this week’s podcast episode.
In the presentation, you’ll hear me talk about five key lessons I’ve learnt about digital transformation:
1) Change is Exponential
2) There is a Revolution at Work
3) Exceptional Talent Wins
4) Perfect is not Best
5) Think the Unthinkable
In case you are wondering you don’t actual need to see the slides to understand the presentation but if you want to have a look you can find them here on SlideShare
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
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Matt Alder [00:01:09]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 76 of the Recruiting Future podcast. For this first episode of 2017, I wanted to offer you something a little bit different. Last year I was fortunate enough to deliver the opening keynote at the excellent HR Tech Fest conference in Johannesbur. My topic was HR’s role in digital Transformation. It was quite a personal presentation for me as I shared some of the lessons that I’ve Learned from the 20 years of my career which I’ve spent being digitally disruptive in a number of industries. The conference organizers made an audio recording of the presentation which I’m delighted to be able to share with you. In case you’re wondering, you don’t need to see the slides to understand the presentation, but if you want to, there’s a link to them in the show notes.
Matt Alder [00:02:06]:
I want to start by saying thank you very much for the warm welcome to South Africa and thank you very much for the British weather that you laid on yesterday. That was, that was, that was very much appreciated. Hi, I’m Matt Alder and I’m sure, like me, you’re looking forward to two days of HR technology, geekery and various other things. There are some great speakers on the agenda and I’m really looking forward to hearing from them as well. But before we start the rest of the conference, it’s my job to talk to you for the next little while and it’s my job really to give you some things to think about for the next two days. So a kind of a lens to look through, to look at the solutions and the case studies and just some food for thought. And the food for thought comes from all of the things that I’ve done. My career. Now, I’m not sure whether it’s coincidentally or via choice, but I’ve worked in lots of industries that have been disrupted by digital technologies. So I started off in the Travel industry, the photography industry. I worked in recruitment marketing for a really long time. At one point I had my own tech startup. And in the last few years I’ve been doing kind of strategy consultancy in the HR tech space. So the theme of the presentation this morning is digital transformation. And I’m sure it’s a theme that lots of the speakers will come back to time and time again as we move forward over the next couple of days. But I wanted to start off with some definitions and to talk a little bit about what I think the role of HR is in digital transformation and then share with you five lessons that I’ve personally learned from the things that I’ve been doing in digital transformation over the last 20 years to see if there’s anything there that might be useful to you as you move through the conference in the next couple of days. So what is digital transformation? Here is a really complicated graph, because I think really complicated graphs are a great way to start the day. This is actually a graph that was produced by a consultancy group called the Autometer Group. And if you actually seriously want to get into the absolute kind of weeds of digital transformation and understand the theory, have things that you can take to stakeholders in your business, I would recommend their white paper on digital transformation.
However, it’s probably a little bit heavy to start a conference with. So I’m going to talk about digital transformation in a very practical way. And to me, this is digital transformation. In fact, you might argue that a lot more things kind of go into your phone these days. So I just want you to kind of reflect on the last sort of 5 to 10 to 15 years and think how much digital technology has changed the way you live, work and communicate. And obviously the massive rise of mobile and all the things it does and all the things it’s replaced are pretty, pretty critical. So from the Altimeter white paper I was talking about, it was written by a really great analyst in this space called Brian Solis, who some of you may have come across. And he wrote a book on what he called digital Darwinism. And I think this is a great thing to look at to consider digital transformation. So digital Darwinism, the evolution of consumer behavior when society and technology evolve faster than your ability to adapt. Okay, so what does that mean in practice? So if you look at what’s happened to the photographic industry in the last two years, one of the places that I spent the early part of my career, you know, look what happened to Kodak. It was the dominant force in photography and then it filed for bankruptcy, instagram I think it was 15 people around a boardroom table in a rented office that Facebook bought for a billion dollars. And the way that we do photography has fundamentally change because of mobile and because of digital. And that industry has changed forever. Travel, you know, hotels like this, under threat from a group of guys who started a platform that was all about putting an air bed in their house and serving people breakfast. That’s where Airbnb came from. So the way we travel, the way we think about things, you know, this massive digital platform and various other things, things like TripAdvisor fundamentally disrupting the way that, the way that travel works. Newspapers, huge disruption here. You know, I was, I came, came in from the, the airport, on the train, and everyone was on their phone, was on their phone reading rather than reading a. Reading a paper newspaper. Now, the thing about digital transformation is it doesn’t stop. So one of the jobs that I had is I worked for the Guardian newspaper, one of the leading newspapers in the uk, And I noticed the other day a quote from the former editor of the Guardian complaining that Facebook had sucked up 20 million pounds of the Guardian’s online advertising revenue because people were now reading the Guardian through Facebook. So this process of digital transformation doesn’t stop. It’s ongoing and it keeps evolving. So the newspapers thought they may have seen off the worst of it, from the move from paper to digital, but Facebook comes along and disrupts things even further. So the key thing to think about is digital transformation doesn’t end, it keeps on going.
Okay, so that was by way of introduction. So what’s the role of HR in digital transformation? And I would see this as two distinct elements. You may disagree, you may have some other thoughts on it, but to me, it’s. It’s about two things. First of all, it’s about HR using technology to transform itself, which is pretty much what the next two days are about, and all the vendors and all the speakers. So that might seem quite an obvious starting point. But the second part, which I think is actually more important, it’s actually what is HR’s role in transforming the business, helping to transform the business that it works in to digital. So there’s some research that was done by Gartner that says by 2020, 70% of companies will either be a digital business or will be becoming a digital business. And that’s kind of really what we’ve seen in the examples that I’ve put forward. So what is HR’s role in that? And to me, I think there’s two parts to it. I think it’s helping to develop a culture of digital transformation and helping to make sure that the companies have the right talent to perform that digital transformation.
So I really think there’s two parts to this. There’s you guys transforming yourselves and the way that you work. But really HR’s role in helping the majority of businesses that are being transformed by digital to do that with the right support round people. Now, there’s lots of challenges to, there’s lots of challenges to this and I’m hoping that some of the examples I’m about to talk about might help you. There’s an obvious challenge around education, educating people in the wider organization and business around digital transformation and the people impacts of that. People not knowing what they don’t know.
The second one, tunnel vision and silos. So organizations working very much to their own agenda, their own departmental agenda, and that creates a real kind of lack of urgent urgency when it comes to digital transformation. And as we’ve seen, or as we’ll see by the speed that these things happen, that’s not a very good place to be.
The third one, which is something I’m sure that you can all empathize with, lack of resources, either because you can’t find specialist talent or you know, because there’s a general, you know, lack of sort of resource and attention towards this kind of thing.
And then the final one is, you know, no common vision. So that may be differing views within the organization. It could be not having enough data to actually understand the changes that need to make place, or it could be having too much data. So it’s very, very difficult to actually see what’s going on. So there’s some of the challenges that I think you’re probably all finding with this.
So let me give you some practical lessons that I learned sometimes the very hard way about digital transform and some things to some things to think about. So lesson one, lesson one is change is exponential. Now I’ve already kind of hinted at this, that things change very, very quickly. Rates have changed, doubling every year. That’s what exponential change is. Let me give you a quick example. And this is kind of a classic example of this concept. So if we look at the concept of removable storage, so you know, data cards and all this sort of stuff, 1965, the IBM 355 megabytes of storage, $120,000 and it had to be transported by plane. Okay, Fast forward to 2013, the Sandrix Ultra Micro SDXC 65,000 megabytes, $60. Now if you actually Kind of track and sort of do the exponential change exercise. That storage does double, does double every year. Now, I. I pinched this from someone else’s presentation who I saw giving it, and I thought, that’s interesting. But does this really follow? Because this kind of goes up to 2013. So I thought, if this is true, I should be able to go onto Amazon and find some kind of memory card with approximately 256 gigabytes of storage. It took me 10 seconds, basically. So exactly the same model, and that’s gone up to 250 gigabytes. I think it was slightly more than $60. But you can kind of forgive me the accuracy there. So just, you know, incredible change. Change that our brains can’t actually process. And that’s the kind of key danger.
So let me show you, you know, how that kind of danger works. This is a graph that maps the user, the monthly user growth of WhatsApp from October 2010 to April 2015. Who uses WhatsApp? Okay, pretty much everyone who used WhatsApp in 2010. Okay, some cool trendsetters down the front here. But that’s kind of the point. Didn’t it just feel like that WhatsApp suddenly appeared and it was suddenly there and everyone was using it? And that’s exponential growth in a really practical way. So what happens for the first few years or the first few months or whatever it is that this change happens? It’s almost invisible, because as you double from 1 to 2, from 2 to 4, from 4 to 8, from 8 to whatever my math says is next 16, you know, you can’t necessarily see that change. So very often we’ll dismiss these fundamental changes because we can’t actually see them happening. But what happens with these exponential growth is suddenly it’s there and everyone’s using it, and it feels like it’s always been there. Now, what I learned in my career, I started off as the Internet, was kind of going through this phase, and then social media and everything else. And when I was kind of young and naive, I felt that once I’d kind of been proved right, that the Internet was here to stay, everyone would believe me and would spot change. And that didn’t happen at all. What happened was all the people who told me that I was wasting my time working in the Internet were the same people who told me a few years later I was wasting my time working in social media. What I learned about that is, as human beings, we always post, rationalize the fact that we were wrong about this kind of stuff. So, you know, Basically, we sort of ignore the fact that we didn’t see these things coming. We’ve always been using it. It’s just the way things work. And I think that’s really interesting and it’s kind of really dangerous. And I think that you need to think about that when you’re thinking about, you know, technology and change within your own organ.
So let me give you a dramatic example of this. So this is a report from the Associated Press on Tuesday, May 15, 2012. Now, 2012 wasn’t that long ago, was it? Everyone remember 2012 doesn’t seem like 1956. Half of Americans think that Facebook is a passing fad, according to the results of a new Associated Press poll. And in the run up to the social network’s initial public offering, half of Americans also say the social network’s asking price is too high. January 27, 2016, Facebook climbs to 1.59 billion users and crushes Q4 estimates with $5.8 billion of revenue. And strangely, its share price is up. Do you know what that means? It means half of Americans were wrong. That’s what it means. But I bet you if we were able to go back and talk to half of Americans, they wouldn’t admit to that. They’d be like, no, no, no. It was always there. We always kind of saw it coming. So just be aware of these two concepts of exponential change. The fact that it’s invisible when it starts and the fact that as humans, we love post rationalizing that we always thought it was going to happen once it’s happened because we don’t actually learn when it happens again. So key learnings from exponential change from lesson one, change initiatives focused around technology will be out of date before they’re completed. So I’m sorry, for anyone who’s in a 1 to 2 to 3 to 5 years digital HR transformation process, by the time you finished it, it will be out of date. So that’s bad news. So really what you have to think about, and this is incredibly difficult to do, and I work with some really, really big organizations and I really appreciate, you know, appreciate the complexity and the difficulty involved in this, but speed and agility are absolutely essential. So the ability to say that we were wrong and change direction very, very quickly is what the companies who will really win in this space will do. And I know that’s not. I know from experience that’s not an easy thing to do.
Okay, lesson two, There is a revolution at work. This is a picture of me in 1994 and actually is me now. This is me hard at work at my first job. Now my first job didn’t appear on my slide earlier because it wasn’t really a digital transformation job, but I was present at my student union for a year and here I am at my high tech desk. I felt I was really innovative because if you look on the wall, look at all those bits of paper. I printed out the internal telephone directory and stuck it on the wall, which meant that literally at the glance of an eye I could get any number that I wanted. I also had a desk phone and the desk phone had two outside lines that were shared between eight people, which is just incredible when you think about it. And this is 1994, which, you know, maybe it is quite a long time ago now, but it doesn’t feel like it was that long ago. So fast forward quite a long time. And this is the office that I wrote this presentation actually. So this is a WeWork office in London, Wework certainly in Europe and North America. It’s one of the fastest growing sort of communal office spaces. It’s outgrowing Regas, which is a big sort of office renting space giant. And it provides this kind of very laid back atmosphere where people can come and work and you know, you can see everyone working. Now this is a photo I didn’t take. I took it from their website. So that isn’t me in the background. I’ve got more hair than that man who looks very out of place amongst all these young cool people, which is how I feel when I work there. But really, really interesting. I mean, you know, work could not be more, could not be more different in that short space of time. So now I don’t have an office. I use these sort of shared offices all over the world. I have a laptop and a phone and I no longer have lots of pieces of paper. So a dramatic revolution in the way that people work. And I’ve noticed that more and more companies using this kind of casual style office setup that promotes conversation and networking and all that kind of stuff. So a fundamental change in what our place of work looks like.
But some people take this even further. So this is an initiative. I’d really check this out. It’s a fascinating thing. It’s called Remote Year. It’s just finished its first year. And what it is, it’s an organization that took a group of 75 people on a 12 month trip around the world and they went to a different city every single month. And Remote Year provided them with accommodation and travel and it provided them with office space. In all of those cities that was kind of open 247 and a Wi fi connection. And the whole idea is that these people are kind of digital nomads, they’re remote workers. So not only does it not matter what their office looks like, it doesn’t actually matter where they are now. I did a podcast interview with Greg, who’s the guy who runs this initiative. And what was interesting is he was actually on a beach in Thailand when I was talking to him because that’s where they were based. And I thought that actually these 75 people would all be freelancers and computer programmers and the kind of people you expect to do this kind of digital nomadic stuff. But actually a huge proportion of them actually had full time jobs and their employer had agreed that they could go and work remotely around the year almost as a kind of, as a way of retaining their talent and allowing these people to get a much broader view of what works. Like so, you know, this is kind of on the edges, but I thought it was a really, really good example. So you know, work physically, physically changing and as we know things that seem out there, initiatives now will be the norm in a few short years time. So offices, workspace, where we work, how we work, fundamentally changing, you know, also how people do work. So you know, all of these are platforms where you can go and buy talent on a project basis. Everything retail and restaurants to designers, to programmers, to accountants, to all kinds of stuff.
So the rise of the so called gig economy, you know, changing the relationship between employer and employees. So that’s changing as well. If you want to know more about the on demand workforce, I’ve got a great interview with Stefan, who’s the CEO of Upwork, which is the biggest, one of the biggest talent platforms in the world. But I want to move on and talk about technology. Does anyone, anyone recognize this? Ah, there we are. I can feel the nostalgia. I can feel the nostalgia coming back at me. If you don’t recognize this, this is msn, the now unfortunately departed MSN Messenger. So when I was working, I worked for two advertising agencies running digital teams. In our first advertising agency, we decided that we needed a better, quicker way of communicating with each other. So we started using MSN messenger as an experiment. And it was amazing. It made us so productive. We could run multiple conversations at the same time. We could show people what we were working on, we could talk to people in different offices in the agency network. And we thought we were being really clever and sophisticated. The people around the agency and the agency’s IT department were absolutely appalled that we would do such a thing. So I was regularly dragged into meetings and told that I was breaching the IT system and encouraging viruses. And I was also told by the chief executive that I was ruining communication within my team because we weren’t talking to each other face to face and we weren’t picking up the phone. Now, it was with great pleasure that all these years later, I realized that we were right. And it’s interesting when you look at some of the internal communication and networking platforms that we use at work, all of them started from the bottom up. So Yammer, now owned by Microsoft, kind of ingratiated itself into organizations by people doing just what we were doing with Instant Messenger. And then Yammer became mainstream. When Yammer became mainstream, the cool people, the technology people started using started using Slack instead. And Slack is absolutely, absolutely brilliant, to the point where Facebook got on the act because it realized that actually everyone already uses Facebook. So if we were to move Facebook into internal professional communications, that would be an easy step.
So the lesson from this is that your users are always the decision maker. So if you’re trying to impose complicated, difficult to use software on people, you know, they might not use it, they might actually find a better answer and use their own thing. So particularly if you’re working on a kind of a top down central technology policy, it’s always worth looking at what the workers in your organizations are using to be productive at work, because there’s so many great, great tools and these tools eventually influence what happens with enterprise technology. So revolution at work lessons. Everything about work is changing. Control unfortunately is an illusion and the user is the decision maker. So I think there’s some really interesting things to think about as we’re sort of talking about enterprise technology in the next couple of days. Okay, lesson three. Exceptional talent wins. Now, I should probably start by giving you a definition of what I mean by exceptional talent. So at the moment I’m writing a book, I’m collaborating with an HR analyst called Mervyn Dynan, and we’re writing a book about what really kind of high growth companies are doing when it comes to recruiting, retaining and developing people. And as part of our research for that book, we’ve come up with this definition based on feedback of the companies that we’re talking to of exceptional talent. So people who possess the skills, attitude, flexibility, and crucially, development potential that can help businesses grow and evolve. So if you’re looking at how HR can support digital transformation throughout the business, it’s the businesses that can attract or Grow exceptional talent who are going to win this, you know, who are going to win this, win this race. And there’s a couple of different ways of thinking about this. The first one and the most obvious one when you’re talking about digital transformation is obviously tech talent. You know, so programmers, developers, project managers, you know, people with the kind of the native digital skills to help companies move forward and stave off the threat of digital disruption and embrace digital transformation. So that’s one aspect to it.
And let me just sort of talk about that first. So last year I did another research project looking at what established traditional companies needed to think about to attract the sort of best technology talent to their organization. So I actually am based in Edinburgh in Scotland and it’s a really interesting market because you have lots and lots of banks who’ve been established sort of 200 years, you know, very previously, very, very traditional businesses all being disrupted in the sort of fintech revolution, being disrupted by digital technology, having to, you know, converse with their customers in more and more digital ways. It’s quite a small market. And in that market there are also a huge amount of high tech startups who are kind of hoovering up all the talent. So when you talk to someone and say, you know, when you talk to mobile developer and say, would you rather work for Skyscanner, which is, you know, the fastest high tech startup in Edinburgh, or would you work for a 200 year old standard Life, they’re more likely to say Skyscanner or so I thought.
But we actually did. So I actually did some research into some of the myths around recruiting tech talent. So you imagine that if you want to recruit the best tech people for your organization, you need to put slides in reception, you need to have 24 hour sort of food and beer and all this and all this and all this kind of stuff. And actually it wasn’t true. It wasn’t true at all. So speaking to tech recruiters, to tech talent to find out what their real motivations were for joining organizations, it was really, really interesting. It was actually these things. The ability to do great work, the ability to make a difference, the ability to learn new skills, what are the team and what’s the culture like? And then finally the salary and benefits. At no point did they say slides in reception, free food or a cool building. So I think sometimes from a recruitment perspective, when we’re thinking about tech talent, we’re maybe looking in the wrong place in terms of what the motivations are. And actually some of those businesses that I talked about in Scotland Some of those banks do a brilliant job attracting really, really talented technology professionals because they do all these things. The ability to actually come in and make a difference and help disrupt a 200-year-old industry is a great opportunity. So, you know, just a few sort of words of caution when it comes to thinking about how you might get sort of experienced tech talent into your business. But actually this isn’t all about technical talent. You know, if we go back, it’s about people who possess the skills, attitude, flexibility and development potential that can help a business grow and evolve.
On my podcast last week, I have an interview with Sam, who’s head of resourcing for House of Fraser. House of Fraser is a 200-year-old retailer in the UK. You know, and in the past, it’s perhaps not been you know, considered the sort of the, you know, the most, you know, the most cutting edge place to work. What they’re doing with recruiting is really interesting. And this isn’t about tech talent. This is actually about how they recruit people to work as salespeople in their stores. So what they’ve done is they’ve realized that actually previous experience does not have any bearing on how good the people that they’re recruiting are. So they’re recruiting for attitude and trainability rather than experience and skills. They don’t use CVs or resumes anywhere in their initial screening of candidates. They’ve designed an automated bespoke online assessment, online assessment piece, which is backed up via video interview. And it’s really all about getting exceptional talent in the form of sales advisors, customer service people into their business and doing that by hiring differently. So throwing all of the traditional ways of hiring out of the window and actually thinking about how can we connect in the best possible way to the people who are going to be brilliant and help us change our business. So when I talk about exceptional talent, I’m not necessarily talking about highly skilled technical people. I’m talking about an attitude that’s throughout the business. That is what will help businesses digitally transform.
Okay. And then the final part of this is you will have to grow your own talent at some point to help with digital transformation. When I was working in advertising, we were massively expanding our digital team because of the opportunity. We had to go from five people to 30 people in four months. And I could not find the skills that we were looking for. Either the people who had them were wanting too much money or didn’t want to come and work in a recruitment marketing agency, or they just didn’t exist. So we Just grew our own, you know, we invested a lot in training. We kind of put people out there, you know, and made them, made them kind of thrive. And some of the people from that period, it’s been brilliant to see, to see them go on and, you know, run their own agencies and become global head of search marketing for various people. Now, it was probably easier to do back then, but I still think that it’s something. As HR professionals, you need to look at your business and say, you know, how can we grow our own, you know, technical, digital, whatever it is, whatever it is, talent. Because the world moves so quickly, you will not always be able to find people with the skills you need or move them or who want to move into your business or your organization. So key learnings from this bit. Understanding motivation is crucial. So understanding the motivation of the exceptional talent you want to hire, absolutely critical. Think differently about the way you hire. If you always hire in the same way that you’ve always hired, you’ll always kind of hire the same kind of people. So if you need to have a revolution in that, you need to think differently and you will have to grow your own talent, you know, that’s absolutely inescapable. So thinking about how you might do that is critical.
Okay, lesson four. Perfect is not best. Now this is a totally hard lesson for me. So kind of roundabout, sort of 2012, 2013, I decided that the future was having a high tech startup and moving to Silicon Valley and becoming the next Mark Zuckerberg. So I bought myself a hooded top and set up my own with a friend of mine, set up my own kind of recruitment technology, mobile technology business. Now. Now it took us nearly two years to actually bring our products to market because we thought we were ahead of the game. We thought we had time and even things like doing our investor and our sales deck took us six months. And we did have other jobs that we were juggling. And what essentially happened was we realized two years after the event that we’d actually missed the opportunity. So while we’d been building a product that was better than our competition, they won the race. They won the. And we sadly lost. Now, it took two years to work out that we’d lost, which was a bit of a shame. But I really kind of learned that perfect is not best.
And there’s a few quotes that I want to share with you that I think are really brilliant. So the hooded top man himself. Move fast and break things. Unless you’re breaking stuff, you’re not moving fast enough. And I think that in the corporate world we all live in, sometimes we’re looking for kind of absolute perfection for things that just work, things that aren’t going to cause us any problems. But actually we’re not moving fast enough, we’re not breaking stuff. And that’s why Facebook is so successful. The next quote is the one that I should have paid attention to, which is from Reid Hoffman, from LinkedIn. If you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late. Which says a lot about LinkedIn, actually. But either way, he’s right. So I think there’s a real aspect here of trying to get things 100% perfect. But as we know from lesson one, any technology change initiative will be out of date by the time it’s launched. So sometimes you just have to launch.
Now, in doing my research, I actually found the source material for this way of thinking. And the source material is actually two and a half thousand years old. And it’s actually Confucius. Better a diamond without a floor. Better a diamond with a floor than a pebble without. So interesting that actually that kind of way of thinking is very, very old. And also, as we know, the user’s a decision maker. So even if you’re launching the most brilliant technology initiative, if your users don’t use it and decide to use something else, then you’ve kind of lost. So it’s good to find out those things early. So the lessons from this, and I think these are really, really, really difficult things. Taking risks is compulsory. And, you know, I know that to some extent a lot of your jobs are to manage risk and negate risk, but actually, you know, if you want to win at this digital transformation game, it’s compulsory, you know, and it’s all about moving, moving beyond the tried and tested, because the tried and tested very quickly goes out of date. And as I’ve said several times now, the user is the decision maker.
Okay, final lesson. Think the unthinkable. And this is, you know, this is probably the most important one. Think the unthinkable. So rewind back to probably, I think about 2003, I got this kind of digital job in this ad agency and I thought I need to kind of live the digital life. A walk, the digital walk. So I bought myself a cutting edge computer. There it is. I was actually delighted because I went onto Google and actually found a picture of the precise computer that I had. And I always remember I bought this from a guy. I kind of phoned up and bought a computer, because who would buy a computer Online. That certainly didn’t happen back then. So I was talking to the guy on the phone and he was upselling me on the hard drive. Anyway, we decided that I needed a 2 gigabyte hard drive for my cutting edge computer. And his words live with me to this day. He said that’s more storage than you could ever possibly use. And I believed him. Anyway, Fast forward to 2016. This is my phone. You can see so my 64 gig iPhone, I’ve used 60 it, 53.2 gig of it. I’ve only got 2.2 gig left. I’ve actually got 40 gigs worth of photos, 9 gigs worth of Spotify music that I was listening to the plane, listening to on the plane on the way here. Now it’s very easy to cast a, you know, to criticize the salesman and me for thinking that this was all the stories that we could use. But back then people didn’t, you know, people didn’t store videos on their hard drive, phones couldn’t take photos. The concept of Spotify would be absolutely ridiculous that you could pay, you know, £10amonth and get access to all of this music. And that’s what I mean by thinking the unthinkable. All of these things were unthinkable to us but actually, you know, when we look back we look kind of pretty, we look pretty stupid. So challenging your assumptions and thinking the unthinkable things might actually happen is critical.
To give you a more up to date example, I remember sort of back, I don’t know, four or five years ago reading about self driving cars and having conversations with people about self driving cars and reading all the sort of top tech commentators thoughts on self driving cars and there was consensus, the consensus was that these things were the future, but no one could quite decide how far in the future they become. Mainstream stream the most kind of out there estimate, the shortest estimate was within 20 years. Lots of people said probably at some point in our lifetime but people won’t do this. And this is four or five years ago. Fast forward to this year. Uber launched its first self driving taxi fleet in the US in Atlanta. It wasn’t even the first one. Someone launched a self driving taxi fleet in Singapore in September. So going from arguing about, well, you know, I’m not sure about this, what about insurance, what about accidents? People won’t like this kind of thing. And now people are using them as taxis and that’s such a short time period. It’s also almost terrifying. And you know, if I said to someone, I’m going to mention self driving cars in my digital transformation presentation. They’d been like, oh, that’s so old hat. That’s so last year. Everyone knows about self driving cars, but I’m just saying how quickly we’ve got used to this idea. Now obviously they’ve got somewhere to go. I think it’s they’re still beta testing these. You can get in them for free. They still have someone sort of physically sitting behind the wheel. But all that progress in terms of how we think in sort of four or five years, what’s going to happen in sort of five years, 10 years time. And people now saying that our children may never actually manually drive a car, which is really interesting.
So thinking the unthinkable, it’s actually really difficult to do, but here are some sort of shortcuts to do it. So always continually question your assumptions and whatever assumptions you made last week, question them again because things are fundamentally changing. Challenge the status quo and keep questioning and keep challenging the status quo. I talked about exponential change right at the beginning. So the speed of, the massive speed of change. Change is now happening at exponential rate. So the speed at which things change is getting quicker and quicker and quicker.
So in summary, these are the five lessons that I learned, sometimes the hard way. And I hope they can potentially give you a lens at which to either argue with me that I’m wrong or a lens to look at the rest of the conference through. So, number one, change is exponential. Number two, there is a revolution at work. Number three, exceptional talent wins. Number four, perfect is not best. And number five, think the unthinkable. Thank you.
Matt Alder [00:41:45]:
My thanks to the eventful group, the organizers of HR Tech Fest for their permission to share the recording. You can subscribe to this podcast on itunes, on Stitcher, or via your podcasting app of choice. Just search for recruiting future. You can find all the past episodes@www.rfpodcast.com on that site. You can also subscribe to the mailing list and find out more about working with me.
Matt Alder [00:42:15]:
Thanks very much for listening.
Matt Alder [00:42:17]:
I’ll be back next week and I hope you’ll join me.
