Coming from Silicon Valley and being able to observe the contribution of those that have passed through the valley I have learned so much about the notion of problem solving and how tech can be applied to accelerate innovation and transformation. I’m not going to review what so many already have. Technology in support of our human needs. My hope is to share some basic principles that you can consider and hopefully apply in what you do in your lives today. With the Pandemic they say that digital transformation has accelerated. In order for so many to survive the choppy waters we are all trying to navigate we must learn to be adaptive to the rapid changes of the day. It is not easy, but there are some simples considerations to help lead us to the other side.

I mentioned the valley is founded on problem solving. Engineers are great at finding the root cause of problems and finding innovative solutions. This takes us out of our comfort zone. In the old days it used to take thousands to craft and build solutions to big problems. This made Silicon Valley a very competitive community wanting to prove we could solve more sophisticated problems from what our peers solving. This is great if you can afford it. Most cannot. Having had to innovate with global distributed teams across several generations of Moore’s Law we learned a lot that can be applied to our present circumstance.

While it is great to have vision for where technology can be applied to solve problems, the power of all the sources of information around us provides a new way to take small steps that you can build on. Understanding how data and micro services will grow rapidly going forward. Having your North Star (vision) helps deliver leadership in markets. Now we can innovate in small steps that can build large movements. Whether it is Slack that started with a small team, got feedback and iterated a solution that was valuable to hundreds of thousands, or Google that starts with small steps and builds on them until they have found adoption of new capabilities, one must consider how to do this for business, education and social impact. Participative Innovation. Small steps can be taken to leverage technology is a practice we all must become comfortable with. Artificial Intelligence is surrounding us and we have a very low literacy rate around this technology and yet it is diffusing into our lives everywhere. This is the problem that we should be diving into, to better understand the Future of Work and for that matter life. More to come……

For now if you want more pay a visit to John Hagel