Trends – Andrew Essa

Trends and issues of AI-enabled legal and compliance services

As AI continues to transform many industries[1], including the legal service industry, many experts are unanimous in predicting exponential growth in AI as a paramount technology to bring new tools and features to improve legal services and access to justice. Already, many aspects of the estimated $786B[2] market for legal services are being digitised, automated and AI-enabled whether discovery in litigation (e.g. RelativityAI), divorce (e.g. HelloDivorce), dispute resolution (e.g. DoNotPay) or contract management (e.g. IronClad).

As with many disruptive technologies, there are many experts who believe that AI will significantly disrupt (rather than extend) the legal market:

“AI will impact the availability of legal sector jobs, the business models of many law firms, and how in-house counsel leverage technology. According to Deloitte, about 100,000 legal sector jobs are likely to be automated in the next twenty years. Deloitte claims 39% of legal jobs can be automated; McKinsey estimates that 23% of a lawyer’s job could be automated. Some estimates suggest that adopting all legal technology (including AI) already available now would reduce lawyers’ hours by 13%”[3]

The real impact will be more nuanced over the long-term as whilst AI will eliminate certain tasks and some legal jobs, it will also augment and extend the way legal services are provided and consumed. In doing so, it will drive new ways of working and operating for both established and new entrant firms who will need to invest in new capabilities and skills to support the opening up new markets, new business models and new service innovations. In the past few decades, we have seen the impact of emerging and disruptive technologies on established players across many sectors, including banking (e.g. FinTechs), media and entertainment (e.g. music, movies, gambling), publishing (e.g. news), travel (e.g. Airbnb) and transportation (e.g. Uber). It is very likely traditional legal providers will be faced with the same disruptive challenges from AI and AI-enabled innovations bundling automation, analytics, and cloud with new business models including subscription, transaction or freemium.

Although AI and AI-enabled solutions present tremendous opportunities to support, disrupt or extend traditional legal services, they also present extremely difficult ethical questions for society, policy-makers and legal bodies (e.g. Law Society) to decide.

This is the focus of this article which sets out a summary of these issues, and is structured into two parts:

Current and future use cases and trends of AI in legal and compliance services;
Key issues for stakeholders including legal practitioners, society, organisations, AI vendors, and policy-makers.

A few notes:

This article is not designed to be exhaustive, comprehensive or academically detailed review and analysis of the existing AI and legal services literature. It is a blog post first and foremost (albeit a detailed one) on a topic of personal and professional interest to me, and should be read within this context;
Sources are referenced within the footnotes and acknowledged where possible, with any errors or omissions are my own.
Practical solutions and future research areas of focus is lightly touched on in the conclusion, however is not a focus for this article.

Part 1 – Current and future use cases of AI in legal and compliance services

Historically, AI in legal services has focused on automating tasks via software to achieve the same outcome as if a law practitioner had done the work. However, increasing innovation in AI and experimentation within the legal and broader ecosystem have allowed solutions to accelerate beyond this historical perspective.

The graphic below provides a helpful segmentation of four main use cases of how AI tools are being used in legal services[4]:

A wider view of use cases, which links to existing legal and business processes, is provided below:

e-discovery;
document and contract management
expertise automation;
legal research and insight
contract management
predictive analytics
dispute resolution
practice automation
transactions and deals
access to justice

Further context on a selection of these uses is summarised below (note, there is overlap between many of these areas):

E-Discovery – Over the past few years, the market for e-discovery services has accelerated beyond the historical litigation use case and into other enterprise processes and requirements (e.g. AML remediation, compliance, cybersecurity, document management). This has allowed for the development of more powerful and integrated business solutions enabled by the convergence of technologies including cloud, AI, automation, data and analytics. Players in the legal e-discovery space include Relativity, DISCO, and Everlaw.

Document and contract management – The rapid adoption of cloud technologies have accelerated the ability of organisations across all sectors to invest in solutions to better solve, integrate and automate business processes challenges, such as document and contract lifecycle management. For contracts, they need to be initiated (e.g. templates, precedents), shared, stored, monitored (e.g. renewals) or searched and tracked for legal, regulatory or dispute reasons (e.g. AI legaltech start-ups like Kira, LawGeex, and eBrevia). In terms of drafting and collaboration, the power of Microsoft Word, Power Automate and G-Suite solutions has expanded along with a significant number of AI-powered tools or sites (e.g. LegalZoom) that help lawyers (and businesses or consumers) to find, draft and share the right documents whether for commercial needs, transactions or litigation. New ‘alternative legal service’ entrants have combined these sorts of powerful solutions (and others in this list) with lower-cost labour models (with non-legal talent and/or lower-cost legal talent) to provide a more integrated offering for Fortune500 legal, risk and compliance teams (e.g. Ontra, Axiom, UnitedLex, Elevate, Integreon);

Expertise Automation –In the access to justice context, there are AI-powered services that automate contentious or bureaucratic situations for individuals such as utility bill disputes, small claims, immigration filing, or fighting traffic tickets (e.g. DoNotPay). Other examples include workflow automation software to enable consumers to draft a will (for a fixed fee or subscription) or chatbots in businesses to give employees access to answers to common questions in a specific area, such as employment law. It is forseeable that extending this at scale in a B2C context (using AI-voice assistants Siri or Alexa) with a trusted brand (e.g. Amazon Legal perhaps?) – and bundled into your Prime subscription alongside music, videos and same-day delivery – will be as easy as checking the weather or ordering an Uber.

Legal Research – New technologies (e.g. AI, automation, analytics, e-commerce) and business models (e.g. SaaS) have enabled the democratisation of legal knowledge beyond the historic use cases (e.g. find me an IT contract precedent or Canadian case law on limitation of liability). New solutions make it easy for clients and consumers (as well as lawyers) to find answers or solutions to legal or business challenges without interacting with a lawyer. In more recent times, legal publishing companies (e.g. LexisNexis, PLC, Westlaw) have leveraged legal sector relationships and huge databases of information including laws and regulations in multiple jurisdictions to build different AI-enabled solutions and business models for clients (or lawyers). These offerings promise fast, accurate (and therefore cost-effective) research with a variety of analytical and predictive capabilities. In the IP context, intellectual property lawyers can use AI-based software from companies like TrademarkNow and Anaqua to perform IP research, brand protection and risk assessment;

Legal and predictive analytics – This area aims to generate insights from unstructured, fragmented and other types of data sets to improve future decision-making. A key use case are the tools that will analyse all the decisions in a domain (e.g. software patent litigation cases), input the specific issues in a case including factors (e.g. region, judge, parties etc) and provide a prediction of likely outcomes. This may significantly impact how the insurance and medical industry operate in terms of risk, pricing, and business models. For example, Intraspexion leverages deep learning to predict and warn users of their litigation risks, and predictive analytical company CourtQuant has partnered with two litigation financing companies to help evaluate litigation funding opportunities using AI. Another kind of analytics will review a given piece of legal research or legal submission to a court and help judges (or barristers) identify missing precedents In addition, there is a growing group of AI providers that provide what are essentially do-it-yourself tool kits to law firms and corporations to create their own analytics programs customized to their specific needs;

Transactions and deals – Although no two deals are the same, similar deals do require similar processes of pricing, project management, document due diligence and contract management. However, for various reasons, many firms will start each transaction with a blank sheet of paper (or sale and purchase agreement) or a sparsely populated one. However, AI-enabled document and contract automation solutions – and other M&A/transaction tools – are providing efficiencies during each stage of the process. In more advanced cases, data room vendors in partnership with law firms or end clients are using AI to analyse large amounts of data created by lawyers from previous deals. This data set is capable of acting as an enormous data bank for future deals where the AI has the ability to learn from these data sets in order to then:
- Make clause recommendations to lawyers based on previous drafting and best practice.
- Identify “market” standards for contentious clauses.
- Spot patterns and make deal predictions.
- Benchmark clauses and documents against given criteria.
- Support pricing decisions based on key variables

Access to justice – Despite more lawyers in the market than ever before, the law has arguably never been more inaccessible. From a small consumer perspective, there are thousands of easy-to-use and free or low cost apps or online services which solve many simple or challenging aspects of life, whether buying properties, consulting with a doctor, making payments, finding on-demand transport, or booking household services. However, escalating costs and increasing complexity (both in terms of the law itself and the institutions that apply and enforce it) mean that justice is often out of reach for many, especially the most vulnerable members of society. With the accelerating convergence of various technologies and business models, it is starting to play a role in opening up the (i) provision of legal services to a greater segment of the population and (ii) replacing or augmenting the role of legal experts. From providing quick on-demand access to a lawyer via VC, accelerating time to key evidence, to bringing the courtroom to even the most remote corners of the world and digitizing many court processes, AI, augmented intelligence, and automation is dramatically improving the accessibility and affordability of legal representation. Examples include:
- VC tools e.g. Zoom, FaceTime
- Process apps e.g. Your Lawyers Online, CourtNav, Hello Divorce
- Robolawyers e.g. Do Not Pay
- Lawyer marketplaces e.g. Probono.net, Paladin, AsylumConnect
- Document and knowledge automation e.g. LegalZoom
- ADR to ODR (online dispute resolution) e.g. eBay, Alibaba
- Speed to evidence – Cloud-based, AI-powered technology e.g. DISCO
- Risk detection e.g. Legal Risk Detector, rAInbow app

2. Key issues for the future of AI-power legal and compliance services

There are many significant issues and challenges for the legal sector when adopting AI and AI-powered solutions. Whilst every use case of AI-deployment is unique, there are some overarching issues to be explored by key stakeholders including the legal profession, regulators, society, programmers, vendors and government.

A sample of key questions include the following:

Will AI in the future make lawyers obsolete?
How does AI impact the duty of competence and related professional responsibilities?
How do lawyers, users and clients and stakeholders navigate the ‘black box’ challenge?
Do the users (e.g. lawyers, legal operations, individuals) and clients trust the data and the insights the systems generate?
How will liability be managed and apportioned in a balanced, fair and equitable way?
How do organisations identify, procure, implement and govern the ‘right’ AI-solution for their organisation?
Are individuals, lawyers or clients prepared to let data drive decision outcomes?
What is the role of ethics in developing AI systems?

U.K. government AI standards published

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/uk-government-publishes-pioneering-standard-for-algorithmic-transparency

BBC’s Reith Lectures – Living with AI

Last Wednesday BBC R4 hosted the first of 4 weekly lectures hosted by Professor Stuart Russell, a world-renowned AI expert at UCLA. The talks (followed by Q&A) examine the impact of AI on our lives and discuss how we can retain power over machines more powerful than ourselves.

I think this area (e.g. AI commercialisation, AI governance, AI safety, AI ethics, AI regulation etc) is going to be one of the hot topics of the next decade alongside trends including climate change, fintech (crypto), AR/VR, quantum computing etc. Accordingly I couldn’t wait to hear Professor Russell speak.

The event blurb states the following:

The lectures will examine what Russell will argue is the most profound change in human history as the world becomes increasingly reliant on super-powerful AI. Examining the impact of AI on jobs, military conflict and human behaviour, Russell will argue that our current approach to AI is wrong and that if we continue down this path, we will have less and less control over AI at the same time as it has an increasing impact on our lives. How can we ensure machines do the right thing? The lectures will suggest a way forward based on a new model for AI, one based on machines that learn about and defer to human preferences.

As I write, I have heard 2 talks both of which have been absolutely fascinating (and quite honestly, scary. Especially regarding military applications of AI which is already here). I didn’t take notes however the BBC interviewed Professor Russell ahead of the talks. I have provided a summary of the Q&A below which is well worth a read:

How have you shaped the lectures?

The first drafts that I sent them were much too pointy-headed, much too focused on the intellectual roots of AI and the various definitions of rationality and how they emerged over history and things like that.

So I readjusted – and we have one lecture that introduces AI and the future prospects both good and bad.

And then, we talk about weapons and we talk about jobs.

And then, the fourth one will be: “OK, here’s how we avoid losing control over AI systems in the future.”

Do you have a formula, a definition, for what artificial intelligence is?

Yes, it’s machines that perceive and act and hopefully choose actions that will achieve their objectives.

All these other things that you read about, like deep learning and so on, they’re all just special cases of that.

But could a dishwasher not fit into that definition?

It’s a continuum.

Thermostats perceive and act and, in a sense, they have one little rule that says: “If the temperature is below this, turn on the heat.

“If the temperature is above this, turn off the heat.”

So that’s a trivial program and it’s a program that was completely written by a person, so there was no learning involved.

All the way up the other end – you have the self-driving cars, where the decision-making is much more complicated, where a lot of learning was involved in achieving that quality of decision-making.

But there’s no hard-and-fast line.

We can’t say anything below this doesn’t count as AI and anything above this does count.

And is it fair to say there have been great advances in the past decade in particular?

In object recognition, for example, which was one of the things we’ve been trying to do since the 1960s, we’ve gone from completely pathetic to superhuman, according to some measures.

And in machine translation, again we’ve gone from completely pathetic to really pretty good.

So what is the destination for AI?

If you look at what the founders of the field said their goal was, general-purpose AI, which means not a program that’s really good at playing Go or a program that’s really good at machine translation but something that can do pretty much anything a human could do and probably a lot more besides because machines have huge bandwidth and memory advantages over humans.

Just say we need a new school.

The robots would show up.

The robot trucks, the construction robots, the construction management software would know how to build it, knows how to get permits, knows how to talk to the school district and the principal to figure out the right design for the school and so on so forth – and a week later, you have a school.

And where are we in terms of that journey?

I’d say we’re a fair bit of the way.

Clearly, there are some major breakthroughs that still have to happen.

And I think the biggest one is around complex decision-making.

So if you think about the example of building a school – how do we start from the goal that we want a school, and then all the conversations happen, and then all the construction happens, how do humans do that?

Well, humans have an ability to think at multiple scales of abstraction.

So we might say: “OK, well the first thing we need to figure out is where we’re going to put it. And how big should it be?”

We don’t start thinking about should I move my left finger first or my right foot first, we focus on the high-level decisions that need to be made.

You’ve painted a picture showing AI has made quite a lot of progress – but not as much as it thinks. Are we at a point, though, of extreme danger?

I think so, yes.

There are two arguments as to why we should pay attention.

One is that even though our algorithms right now are nowhere close to general human capabilities, when you have billions of them running they can still have a very big effect on the world.

The other reason to worry is that it’s entirely plausible – and most experts think very likely – that we will have general-purpose AI within either our lifetimes or in the lifetimes of our children.

I think if general-purpose AI is created in the current context of superpower rivalry – you know, whoever rules AI rules the world, that kind of mentality – then I think the outcomes could be the worst possible.

Your second lecture is about military use of AI and the dangers there. Why does that deserve a whole lecture?

Because I think it’s really important and really urgent.

And the reason it’s urgent is because the weapons that we have been talking about for the last six years or seven years are now starting to be manufactured and sold.

So in 2017, for example, we produced a movie called Slaughterbots about a small quadcopter about 3in [8cm] in diameter that carries an explosive charge and can kill people by getting close enough to them to blow up.

We showed this first at diplomatic meetings in Geneva and I remember the Russian ambassador basically sneering and sniffing and saying: “Well, you know, this is just science fiction, we don’t have to worry about these things for 25 or 30 years.”

I explained what my robotics colleagues had said, which is that no, they could put a weapon like this together in a few months with a few graduate students.

And in the following month, so three weeks later, the Turkish manufacturer STM [Savunma Teknolojileri Mühendislik ve Ticaret AŞ] actually announced the Kargu drone, which is basically a slightly larger version of the Slaughterbot.

What are you hoping for in terms of the reaction to these lectures – that people will come away scared, inspired, determined to see a path forward with this technology?

All of the above – I think a little bit of fear is appropriate, not fear when you get up tomorrow morning and think my laptop is going to murder me or something, but thinking about the future – I would say the same kind of fear we have about the climate or, rather, we should have about the climate.

I think some people just say: “Well, it looks like a nice day today,” and they don’t think about the longer timescale or the broader picture.

And I think a little bit of fear is necessary, because that’s what makes you act now rather than acting when it’s too late, which is, in fact, what we have done with the climate.

The Reith Lectures will be on BBC Radio 4, BBC World Service and BBC Sounds.

25 Legal Tech Stats for 2020/21

This week I came across a blog post from ImpactMyBiz which compiled a list of great statistics, use cases and market data pertaining to the current state of technology in the legal sector.

In sum, there’s a lot of good progress but the sector is still subject to a lot of hype and extremely slow adoption when compared to other sectors. This is moreso in the B2B space with B2C innovation moving at a faster rate of adoption in improvement over time.

Perhaps the continued challenges presented by COVID around the world, increasing regulatory complexity, competitive pressures from alternative legal service providers (ALSP) and new entrants, remote working, client cost pressures, access to justice, and other key drivers will continue to move the needle forward.

25 legal tech stats to shed light on where where the industry is heading for in the new decade:

1. In 2018, legal tech investments broke the $1 billion mark. That figure was topped in 2019, with $1.23 billion in funding by the end of the third quarter alone.

2. With the help of AI, a contract can be reviewed in less than an hour, saving 20-90% of the time needed to perform this work manually without sacrificing accuracy.

3. AI legal technology offerings for businesses increased nearly two-thirds in 2020 compared to 2019.

4. JP Morgan launched their in-house program, COIN, which extracts 150 attributes from 12,000 commercial credit agreements and contracts in a few seconds. This is equivalent to 360,000 hours of legal work by lawyers and loan officers per year.

5. Cloud usage among firms is 58%, with smaller firms and solos leading the way.

6. Security measures are lacking, with no more than 35% of firms using precautionary cybersecurity measures to protect their businesses. A staggering 7% of firms have no security measures at all.

7. Despite some reservations, lawyers continue to use popular consumer cloud services like Google Apps, iCloud and Evernote at higher rates than dedicated legal cloud services. Clio and NetDocuments ranked the highest among the legal cloud services.

8. The percentage of the ABA 2019 Legal Technology Survey participants answering “Yes” to the basic question of whether they had used web-based software services or solutions grew slightly, from 55% to 58%. 31% said “No”, a small decrease.

9. When asked what prevented their law firms from adopting the cloud, 50% cited confidentiality/security concerns, 36% cited the loss of control and 19% cited the cost of switching.

10. 26% of respondents in a 2019 survey report that their law firms have experienced some sort of security breach

11. In 2018, just 25% of law firms reported having an incident response plan. In 2019, this figure had risen to 31%, and we expect the same for 2020.

12. Interest in cloud services from law firms is high, but expectations of adoption among them remain low, with just 8% of firms indicating they will replace existing legacy software with cloud tools.

13. Only one-third of lawyers (34%) believe their organizations are very prepared to keep up with technology changes in the legal market.

14. Firms described as “technology leading” fared better, with 50% prepared to meet digital technology demands in the industry.

15. 49% of law firms report that they are effectively using technology today, and 47% say they can improve technology adoption and plan to do so.

16. Over half (53%) of lawyers in the US and Europe say their organizations will increase technology investment over the next three years.

17. While over half of lawyers expect to see transformational change in their firms from technology like AI, big data and analytics, fewer than one quarter say they understand them.

18. The biggest trends cited by lawyers that are driving legal tech adoption are “Coping with increased volume and complexity of information” and “Emphasis on improved productivity and efficiency.”

19. It is estimated that 23% of work done by lawyers can be automated by existing technology.

20. 27% of the senior executives at firms believe that using digital transformation is not a choice, but a matter of survival.

21. The top challenges for corporate legal departments today include reducing and controlling outside legal costs; improving case and contract management; and automating routine tasks and leveraging technology in work processes.

22. 60% of lawyers believe their legal firm is ready to adopt new technology for routine tasks.

23. According to research conducted by Gartner, only 19% of law firms’ in-house teams are ready to move forward with enterprise-level digital strategies.

24. A recent study uncovered that 70% of consumers would rather use an automated online system or “lawbot” to handle their legal affairs instead of a human lawyer because of three important factors—cost, speed, and ease of use.

25. 70% of businesses indicated that “using tech to simplify workflow and manual processes” to cut costs was a top priority going forward.

“New Law” Opportunities for Law Firms

I recently came across a presentation I gave in April 2015 to senior partners at Eversheds LLP in London. At the time, Eversheds were proactive in starting to diversify their professional services offerings away from traditional legal and transactional work into ‘alternative’ services areas, such as business improvement consulting for in-house legal teams, and flexible resourcing solutions.

You can view the deck here: Download

At the time, it was unusual for a major corporate firm to be experimenting into different areas.

The question for the presentation was as follows:

Downward cost pressure, deregulation and new technology are transforming the legal industry, as ‘New Law’ providers compete with traditional law firms. What are the opportunities for large law firms in this evolving marketplace?

I focused on 2 main themes of (a) Changing the mind-set and (b) Managing innovation.

Since then, in six years a lot of innovation has been introduced into the legal sector. However, it has been a fairly low-bar for many years with the legal sector ‘glacial’ when it comes to change and technology.

Certainly the ‘legaltech’ and/or ‘lawtech’ markets have received significant injections of VC to build next generation B2C and B2B solutions. Most large firms are now experimenting with different AI and automation solutions, running incubators, offering flexible resourcing arrangements, investing in start-ups, and so on.

To better support Fortune500 General Counsels with their efficiency challenges, the Big4 are building services and capability at scale, as are legal process outsourcers and ALSP’s.

Many of these ideas were referenced in the presentation.

However, the critical question is has anything really changed in how legal services are delivered, bought and sold? How much of this is ‘innovation theatre’ and nibbling around the edges versus real change?

For example:

Does the partner in the Freshfields office in HK work any differently then they did as a trainee 20 years ago?
Are the skills and requirements of a newly qualified lawyer any different?
Does the single lawyer law office in Bristol run their practice any differently?
Does the COO of a regional law firm run the business any differently?
Do consumers who need a family lawyer do this any differently?
Does the barrister or judge involved in a trial do this any differently?

The short answer I think is not a great deal of change across the industry as a whole. However there has been a tonne of experimentation and innovation in some fragmented areas, especially in B2C (e.g. DoNotPay). COVID-19 has certainly accelerated this, and that can only be a good thing.

I think what we are seeing is a marathon, not a sprint. In fact, it is more like the start of a triathlon where there’s a washing-machine effect as participants fight their way forward before a steadier state emerges.

We see this with most new technologies, where things often take much longer to truly disrupt. In retail and e-Commerce, it is only recently that the Internet is causing significant challenges for traditional players, almost 20 years after the Dot.Com crash in 2001.

One thing is for sure – the next 10 to 15 years in the legal sector will be fascinating.

How To Create Winning Strategies That Reignite Human Potential, Adaptability and Creativity

Yesterday I gave a presentation to a NED Forum event sponsored by Investec. It covers a topic that I think is one of the most important issues for CEOs and Boards today who continue to grapple with the challenges of COVID.

The 3 key objectives for the presentation were to:

Better understand what are some of the key and complex forces at play in organisations due to COVID
How organisations can be more adaptable and resilient to future disruptive change
And how to do this with more humanity using some best practices of a growing new breed of organisations out there

You can view the presentation here or below including the REIGNITE! 2020 Report:

andrew-essa-ned-forum-talk-sept-8-2020-5 Download

The REIGNITE! 2020 Report

For those interested on more detail, below I have pasted in snippets of the talk including the Introduction.

Enjoy!

——

Hello and welcome everyone. Thank you to The NED Forum and Investec for the opportunity to speak here today. My name is Andrew Essa, and today I’m going to cover a topic that I think is one of the most important, if not THE most important, issues for CEOs and Boards today.

And that is:

Not just about turning this COVID crisis into an opportunity

Not just about where CEOs should focus, or where to invest

And not just about what winning strategies to implement to outmanouevure the competition

But more about HOW to do all of this in a way that is also more humane, more trusting and less bureaucratic, and in a way that can unleash the potential and creativity of people to have more impact and more fulfilling work lives

So we will aim to do 3 things here today:

Better understand what are some of the key and complex forces at play in organisations
How organisations can be more adaptable and resilient to future disruptive change
And how to do this with more humanity using some best practices of a growing new breed of organisations out there

Slide 2 – Gary Hamel quote

So to bring this quote which I love and also my ‘fascination’ with this topic – I’ll tell you a quick story about ABC Learning Company, based here in Gsy.
Obviously that is not their real name but I came across them in some research I did during Q2 and lockdown.
In the research which later became the REIGNITE 2020 Report – which I’ll introduce shortly – there was so much devastation across sectors including travel, hospitality, retail, construction, manufacturing, and so on.
In fact 50% of the 439 leaders surveyed were in total despair, in terms of closures, restructuring, uncertainty and so on.
However…there was a glimmer of hope!
About 10% of businesses were doing extraordinary things. They were using the crisis as an opportunity to reset, rethink, and reinvent. They were pivoting, quickly using technology to launch new offerings, testing new business models, and at the same time becoming more efficient, productive and reducing costs.
In terms of ABC Learning, it was a typical lifestyle business providing high school tutors, owned by one person with 5 tutors on the payroll. No online presence, web-site or anything. Business stopped overnight with lockdown, but by rethinking things quickly and using simple online and digital tools – google spreadsheets for CRM and bookings, zoom for delivery of live sessions, stripe for online or over the phone payments, the owner was not only able to quickly survive but doubled revenue during lockdown, hired 10 more tutors on contracts, and created a scalable solution which allowed for recorded training on-demand on popular topics. So better CX, more revenue and profits.
So what is interesting here is the combination of human psychology and business strategy during a crisis: so how did the leader reinvent whilst everyone was retreating, what can we learn, and how can we emulate this for our own contexts
This is what underpins today’s talk and certainly the REIGNITE 2020 Report which I’ll introduce shortly.

Slide 5 – The Modern Org is Under Attack

So the modern organisation is clearly under attack from so many angles.
The pace of change now is exponential and only will increase as further technological convergence happens through digital, AI, automation, analytics and so on
Today’s orgs look and feel very similar to how they have always been – command-control, top-down consistency, coordination and standardisation- which is the classic bureaucracy
In US 1983-2019 the bureaucratic workforce – managers and overhead – has doubled in that time-frame VS growth of 50% in all other job categories
At same time productivity per OECD has gone down since them
Mental health, burnout, anxiety, stress, bullying, politics, discrimiation, harassment etc has skyrocketed
Do we know anyone who is a leader, manager or worker and genuinely feels inspired, trusted, valued and engaged by their organisation every day??
We can’t afford it anymore!
So the question becomes, is it possible to build organisations that are big and fast, disciplined and empowering, responsive to market shifts yet resilient, efficient and entrepreneurial, and bold and prudent?
Many examples of new breeds of organisations successfully operating with 1/2 of bureaucratic load of traditional org
Case study – Buurtzorg (page xi)
- Dutch firm Birdszaard home-health employers 16,000 nurses and home-carers with 2 line managers with a span of control of 1-8000!
- They do this with dividing into small teams, give them the data they need to be self-managing, connect with a social platform to collaborate to solve problems and collaborate and share best practices, hold deeply accountable with P&Ls
- Gives all the advantages of bureaucracy with control, consistency and coordination with no drag or overhead

On Digital Business:

Speed and scale: Digital and cloud has enabled adaptability at speed and scale;
- The crisis has shown that rapid change at speed and scale is possible using digital and cloud in the short-term.
Increased adoption: Increased adoption of back-end cloud and front-end productivity tools, from e-signature to VC to MS365 to Dropbox etc
Effectiveness and benefits: Focus now on what is working, what isn’t, benefits realisation, productivity, efficiency, training,
Complexity: So much going on…..managing capacity, cybersec, managing the complexity of the new IT estate, ensuring greater resource allocation with 2021 budgets, investments and leadership commitment to that
Scaling and Transformation: The best firms – probably not many – are:
- firmly putting digital at the centre of corporate strategy
- looking whether to build vs buy
- aligning leaders on digital acumen so every CXO is a Chief Digital Officer for their function
- looking at wider opportunities for upskilling and digital adoption across the firm – so beyond infrastructure into more advanced worker productivity tools – automation, AI, analytics, superior Customer Experiences, New Business Models and Products/Services, Ecosystem Collaborations/Ventures
- As well as more strategically, how to better organise and transform to become a digital business
Caution! Digital laggards will get left behind due to external forces and competitive intensity

On Trust + Safety:

So this is such a critical, complex and often overlooked dimension, mainly as it requires leaders to be empathetic and emotionally intelligent, and unfortunately many aren’t
The BIG opportunity is that for the firms who get these complex dynamics right, will differentiate themselves from a talent retention and hiring perspective and become the new employers/brands of choice 2021+
But first we need to look at the state of play before COVID
In a nut-shell, there is very little trust, just need to look at amount of oversight, rules, policies, rule-choked processes and employees get this and know they aren’t trusted and even that their managers don’t think they are very capable
UK amount of discretion people have in jobs has been going down in last 20years
Only 1 out of 5 believe their opinions matter at work
Only 1 in 10 have the freedom to experiment with new solutions and methods
Most people can buy a car or house but same people in organisations can’t order a better £150 work chair without going through crazy internal hoops and hurdles
The way organisations are organised it is a caste system of managers and employees of thinkers/doers which causes disengagement of people from their work
Gallup surveys show only 20% of those highly engaged in their work – this is ALARMING so something needs to change
So against that backdrop you introduce a health and economic crisis of proportions never seen before, which impacts the human psyche in many different ways, and for most orgs you have a widening trust gap
Key impacts:
- The “psychological contract” between employer/employee has also shifted for many
- Traditional work assumptions have been challenged, firms must now not assume ‘old’ practices were the right ones
- Acceleration of complex issues around safety, mental health, inclusivity, belonging, empathy, EQ, culture and behaviour, power dynamics, and expectations on leadership styles

The Power of Language To Communicate Strategy & Change

I used this slide at a presentation yesterday.

For me its purpose was to contrast current/future states and link to best practices.

However one of the participants (Banking senior executive) said he loved how it simply showed how powerful ‘language’ can be to communicate a new strategy, initiative or change.

He said they have been stuck for years using the same old terminology from the ‘old’ column.

This was brilliant.

An unexpected but simple example showing the power of fresh #perspectives #diversityofthought #customerdevelopment #userfeedback

An Interview With Gary Hamel

I recently listened to the Eat.Sleep.Work. Repeat podcast where Bruce Daisley interviewed Gary Hamel about his new book Humanocarcy. I posted about my excitement to recieve the pre-order of it here, and am really enjoying working my way through it.

If you are a leader, manager or worker in ANY job, this book (or notes below) is a must-read.

Whilst I rarely (well, never) take notes of the podcasts I listen to, after the first 5min it was clear I needed to capture the content. There was just so much unbelievable value Gary Hamel was providing.

And so the below represents my rough notes of that interview (which includes the below quote – so simple, yet so powerful):

Cannot assume that low-skill jobs means low-skill capabilities! – Gary Hamel

Enjoy!

What is the impact of COVID on the world of work?

Remote work and flexibility is possible, that will continue
Power moves to the periphery. Front-line people have had to use their ingenuity along with more freedom and autonomy so these people will not want to go back to traditional roles
Institutional and political resilience has come up short. Organisations are poorly suited to fast-moving, demanding problems and challenges beyond COVID such as racial injustice, income inequality, environmental change, automation impacts will need everyone to turn on everyone’s creativity

What is going on with the state of trust?

Yes very little trust, just need to look at amount of oversight, rules, policies, rule-choked processes and employees get this and know they aren’t trusted and even that their managers don’t think they are very capable
UK amount of discretion people have in jobs has been going down in last 20years
Only 1 out of 5 believe their opinions matter at work
Only 1 in 10 have the freedom to experiment with new solutions and methods
Most people can offered to buy a car or house but same people in organisations can’t order a better £150 work chair without going through crazy internal hoops and hurdles
The way organisations are organised it is a caste system of managers and employees of thinkers/doers which causes disengagement of people from their work
Gallup surveys show only 20% of those highly engaged in their work – this is ALARMING so something needs to change

What is the impact of bureaucracy?

A 1/3 of wage bill goes to managers, supervisors and administrators
A 1/3 of all hours/activities in organisations goes to bureaucratic tasks
In US 1983-2019 the bureaucratic class has grown by 200% (doubled) in that time-frame VS growth of 50% in all other job categories
It’s not about more regulation but the proliferation of new functions
At same time productivity per OECD has gone down since them
We can’t afford it anymore!
Many examples of post-bureaucratic vanguard of firms operating with 1/2 of bureaucratic load of traditional org
Dutch firm Birdszaard home-health employers 16,000 nurses and home-carers with 2 line managers with a span of control of 1-8000!
They do this with dividing into small teams, give them the data they need to be self-managing, connect with a social platform to collaborate to solve problems and collaborate and share best practices, hold deeply accountable with P&Ls
Gives all the advantages of bureaucracy with control, consistency and coordination with no drag or overhead
Can cut the bureaucratic drag by 50% would produce 10T gain in economic output across OECD (in UK £900B) and would double productivity growth rate over next 10 years
No other proposals on the table eg improving education, more incentives for capital investment
Economic reason, competitive reasons, social reasons as ethically the reason to do this

How do we get there?

Foundation for building a post-bureaucratic organisation is everyone thinking and acting like an entrepreneur, owner
Pre-Industrial era most owners/employees 4-5 people, all customer-focused and knew each other
As organisations scaled in line with Industrial revolution that was lost and no longer have the information to be self-organisation
Firms that do it e.g. Haier, Nucor ensure the front-line people have the information, skills, incentives, and freedom to think/act like owners
Still have to have coordination and tie the org together, instead of top-down it can be via collaboration
Some organisations have ESSP but that’s not what an owner – autonomy, right to make key decisions, right of participation in the financial upside of the business

Have we over-valued consistency and scale?

Bureaucracy invented to enable control and efficiency at scale with a top-down model
Replicability required to do things properly at scale
But that makes it very hard to change
Control is important in most industries!
But what else is important and what other ways to achieve it?
Orgs at heart are built to maximise control
Today we need orgs to maximise contribution with free to experiment, free to respond quickly to customer needs, free to solve local problems, not waiting for permission
In bureaucratic model everything comes top-down which makes it hard to change fast
By the time an issue is big enough to attract CEO’s attention, often too late by then
E.g. Intel CXOs only would go after $1B Opportunities – but how do you know what is this at this scale? Only way is if someone else is already doing it i.e. not original, innovative. Nothing starts out as a $1B opportunity VS Amazon which experiments with all sorts of opportunities at different levels VS waiting for someone at the top to say ‘this is a strategic priority’ which will rarely happen

Experimentation is part of the new Org DNA

Pace which anything evolves is limited by the amount of experimentation that takes place e.g. humans today
Worrying that vast majority of employees say it’s virtually impossible for front-line employee to get a small amount of time and budget to try something new
More than ⅔ of employees say new ideas are greeted by hostility or skepticism
E.g. central collaboration platform at a global tech retailer to share ideas and issues and real-time and treat the stores/orgs as a laboratory
Bezos says his goal is to build the world’s biggest lab, best place to create break-out success or fail with ideas vs if know it will succeed as have data it will likely be incremental innovation
Intel hires goes through ‘Design To Delight’ programme teaching ‘design thinking, rapid prototyping, agile, experimentation’

Is the moment now a great opportunity to experiment?

We’ve had the tools/tech to enable remote working for over a decade
Whilst tech becomes more available, also enables orgs to exert more control! Due to analytics.
But data is not context and is historical
We can assign every worker a detailed rulebook on what they need to do and somehow it aggregates into extraordinary performance. But does not reflect reality
Battle of forces pushing decentralisation and autonomy and remotely, enabling lateral communications VS vertical challenging managers top-down
Same complexity to drive decentralisation is also pushing to exert control especially with the old guard
One of the ways to ‘soothe’ a leader is to go to bed at night is that there is a policy to guide everything! I.e. squeeze the complexity of the chaos and world by creating appearance of uniformity and control but reality is far from it

The paradox of forces at play:

Consistency does matter – when I got to Apple store we expect certain things
But we do need this and creativity on the front-line with ability to tweak and change to make the real-time trade-offs
E.g. Nucor – unleashed the everyday genius of workers
Tension between adaptability vs consistency
Even if irreconcilable the eco value from scale is not what it used to be VS demand now for customised, personal experiences
It will be a long slog
Over 70% say the prime way to get ahead is to be a good bureaucrat! i.e. horde resources, politics, climb ladder, attain positional power
But requires political challenge to redistribute power which no-one will like to do that
System is working for anyone – workers, managers, leaders
It all grows to accumulate power! We have to change that game
Power needs to be fluid in orgs
If adding value people or a mentor or inspiring people will follow

What;’s happening in politics?

There’s a belief that the system is not working for them – income inequality, low wage jobs, equity
Workers treated like commodities, resources VS opportunity to use all competencies, skills, grow etc
Cannot assume that low-skill jobs means low-skill capabilities!
Stop talking about low-skilled jobs!
US Bureau of Stats – 70% low-skilled jobs are designed so people cannot use their originality
Economically indefensible that we haven’t done more to given front-line people the opportunity to grow and use ingenuity

Can all orgs make this change away from bureaucracy?

If you are a smaller business, what are the principles to hold scared as you grow the org
Founding principle – humanity vs bureaucracy
From the start highly alert to the signs of bureaucracy to stay vibrant

US Airlines example

Needed to kick-off some people to allow crew on
Staff did not have authority to offer correct incentives
Passenger carried off and became worst PR disasters ever
The CEO said workers did not have the procedures, guidelines, rules to use their own judgement! But it was the existence of too many rules that did not allow the local staff to use their own judgement
Manual at UA is 60 pages VS manual at Southwest Air 5 pages

Haier Case Study

Hair Chinese domestic appliances
They wanted to build a network company
They divided 80k organisation into 4k micro-enterprises
All businesses had rights and flexibility akin to start-ups with significant incentives
Tied together with internal contracts for services e.g. HR or can go outside
Everyone’s performance – including internal contracts – is tied together on the success of the product in the market so everyone is aligned
Make it easy to start new businesses, if new idea post it online internally and others can join, Haeir can give you access to their VC network and they will co-invest and you can leverage the Haier network
Haier to make the journey redeployed 12k middle-managers to the micro-enterprises (or left), today three is 1 level between front-line and CEO, most firms have 8 levels

4 Major Post-COVID Megatrends

This week I came across a great report and visual from market intelligence firm Luxinnovation. It focused in on the major megatrends that will impact the economic recovery: digitalisation, sustainability, resilience and new business strategies (see below):

The study “Post COVID-19 Market Trends” is based on information from three sources:

National recovery strategies that have already been published by European countries, as well as the European Commission’s recovery plan and position papers issued by international organisations such as the OECD and the World Economic Forum
Technology and innovation market studies taking into account the impact of the COVID-19 crisis
Articles published by specialised press on topics related to current market trends in the post COVID-19 period

As the report aligns with recent research I conducted into strategic responses of a range of organisations across the world (REIGNITE! 2020 Report), I’ve summarised the key points below as highlighted by Sara Bouchon, Head of Market Intelligence at Luxinnovation.

On digital:

Even though the crisis brought some parts of the economy to a near standstill during the lockdown, it has strongly accelerated some trends, such as digitalisation
A large proportion of the workforce had to switch to remote working with almost no advance notice, for example, and many shops had to very rapidly start selling their products online
Digitalisation also turned out to be a success factor for some industrial companies with a high level of automation, which allowed them to continue producing even when the staff could not be present on site. This will speed up the development of the factories of the future that are based on Industry 4.0 principles

On resilience:

The huge impact of the current health crisis has raised people’s awareness of the potential consequences of a future climate-related crisis.
Many governments have recognised the need for a sustainable recovery and the opportunity to “build back better”, to use the words of the OECD
Recovery plans will include dimensions such as achieving the transition to renewable energy, shifting to a circular economy and rethinking food value chains to make them more local and environmentally friendly. There is also a will to invest in sustainable infrastructure
The ability to absorb and adapt to external shocks is vital, for countries as well as for companies and individuals. This crisis has highlighted vulnerabilities in the way our society functions of which we were not aware. It is essential that we work on lessons learnt and define what we can do to become more resilient.
A main focus in obviously on the healthcare system that is some places has been pushed to the very limits of its capacities. Other key issues include the building of regional supply chains, the development of new skills that help the labour force be flexible and agile, and ways to stimulate an inclusive democracy

On business strategies:

While businesses are now dealing with the severe short-term impacts of the crisis, many of them will have to reconsider their strategies in the post-crisis period, taking into account the “new normal” situation.
Some companies that adapted their production in order to respond to the urgent needs for disinfectants, face masks and visors, for example, are considering whether to stay in those markets or not.
Others, who changed their business model to offer online shopping or home deliveries, ask themselves the same questions
COVID-19 has been a strong driver of new forms of business innovation
New partnerships have been formed that would not have happened otherwise, and we can see much more of open innovation. This, in turn, challenges the current regulations of intellectual property as many innovations stem from cooperations involving several organisations
The health crisis has created new consumption and working habits, new needs to ensure that sanitary measures are being respected in offices, shops and other public areas, and new demands for entertainment in a context where large gatherings and face-to-face contacts are difficult. These are some of the areas in which we expect to see a lot of innovation in the near future.”

If you are interested in more context on the future implications of COVID, check out my recent report called REIGNITE! 2020 Report

OneTrust: How A Privacy-Law-Compliance Tech Start-Up Became America’s Fastest Growing Company

Today I came across an incredible story of OneTrust, a privacy-law-compliance start-up based in Atlanta.

OneTrust landed at No. 1 on this year’s Inc. 5000, with more than $70 million in 2019 revenue and a staggering 48,337.2 percent three-year growth rate. It is among the global leaders in privacy-law-compliance technology with a suite of digital tools that gives companies a clearer view of all the user data they accumulate.

This enables them to comply with privacy laws, like the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) which gives consumers greater control of how companies can use their data.

Whilst Enterprise B2B SaaS and analytics isn’t the most sexiest space, in many cases, firms that play there can be the fastest-growing, most scaleable and profitable (and do good things at the same time).

In an age of Big Tech monopolies, increasingly intelligent AI and API-powered platform business models, growing regulatory oversight and appetite, and increasing consumer-awareness, OneTrust and others are clearly riding a tidal wave.

Read the full story here

3 Big Digital Priorities for Leaders

After analysing the data of over 439 senior leaders at global organisations in the recent REIGNITE! 2020 Report, it was clear that the use of technology for 95% of the majority had been to maintain business operations, whether that was survival or business continuity in facilitating remote work.

This is not surprising per se in response to a major emergency. Before the tectonic shifts caused by COVID-19, some organisations were executing on multi-year digital transformation plans, with others focused on fighting other fires with digital not even on the radar.

The ongoing pandemic, economic, social and health crises continues to raise the stakes for leaders on digital priorities, underscored by three major opportunities:

#1 Increased digital adoption enables adaptability at speed and scale

For many firms this has involved a combination of accelerated back-end cloud, front-end software tools, and new ways of working. Many of those digital initiatives quickly became make or break—for example restaurants, cafes, and retailers enabling digital orders and connecting seamlessly with delivery services.

Other firms however continue to have core (or hybrid) infrastructure set-ups based on outdated tools, processes, and assumptions which need to be re-envisioned for the evolving landscape, continuing remote workforce requirements and leadership appetite to maximise the full potential of digital across the firm.

The focus for leaders should be to build on the momentum of change the crisis has caused (‘it can be done!’) and adoption by moving beyond ‘getting back to business’ and understanding the full set of digital opportunities for customers, internal processes, workers, and organisational capabilities.

#2 Digital acceleration increases the widening gap between the ‘laggards’ and transforming leaders

COVID-19 has accelerated this trend and has firmly planted digital and innovation at the top of most CEO’s (and CXO’s) agenda. Whilst many of the worlds large and small companies went into tailspin or survival mode once the pandemic took hold, a handful of digital-powered and platform-enabled companies have instead added billions to their market capitalisation and top-line revenues. And they won’t stop (even likely break-up by the US government will not slow them down).

In other words, if COVID crisis hasn’t shown you the burning platform (i.e. how fast change is moving, and how digital can help you adapt), then nothing will.

Here are the 3 rough categories of organisations today:

The Leaders:

A business or brand, which has invested heavily (monetarily and otherwise) into a digital transformation strategy that goes far beyond ‘remote work facilitation’. Integrating key technologies and talent (up skilling existing and augmenting with external expertise) to elevate customer experiences, exploit new business models and ventures, and optimise business processes. Not to be confused with those who have attempted digital transformation, only to implement a new email system and hang up their hats.

The Laggards:

Those who, for whatever reason, have failed to incorporate new technologies and/or invest in up skilling their talent, leaving their business to rely solely on manual or traditional forms of operations, business models, go-to-market, and communications. While you may be inclined to think of this group as pure traditionalists, grasping on to their old standards, assumptions and ways of working, this group has grown to include a much broader range of organisations.

In talking with many leaders and employees across the world, it is surprising how many leaders have gone straight back to this way of working after Q2 2020 lockdown. In some cases, they have retreated even further.

The Middle-Ground Mavens:

This may be the point in which you find yourself asking, but what about those in middle? Not quite a leader, but definitely not a laggard. In our post-COVID world and given the pace of change, the space taken up by these ‘middle ground mavens’ you could argue is increasingly dwindling, giving way to a landscape in which we can only find ourselves as laggards or leaders. Those who have mastered the art of transformation and innovation, and those who have not.

(NB This is obviously hugely simplified and far from black or white, but the sentiment remains).

For non-tech large incumbents with some tailwinds and the appetite to transform, there is significant opportunity to use the scale and resources to digitise processes for efficiency, and at the same time, investing in future growth and innovation portfolios, new business models, and up skilling. PingAn’s transformation is a brilliant case in point.

Whilst this is not easy and requires the right leadership, the alternative is arguably worse: a slow death-march toward extinction or significant value-destruction.

#3 Digital acceleration enables more advanced and integrated human and digital combinations

In other words, digital adoption will enable the workforce of today and tomorrow (e.g. remote, virtual, distributed, agile, flexible, gig etc) to become more productive, effective and efficient (‘smarter’) utilising automated workflows (enabled by cloud, analytics, AI, automation, software) of both repetitive and higher-order tasks.

The Boston Consulting Group call this the ‘Bionic Organisation’ which at its core will combine more advanced and integrated human/software combinations (see below):

According to BCG, what the company of the future will look like is becoming clearer. At the centre is purpose and strategy: the reasons it is in business and how it brings those reasons to life. Four enablers allow companies to operate as bionic organizations: two have to do with technology and data, while the other two address talent and organisation.

What’s next?

To better understand these issues further or explore our range of digital business advisory offerings, get in touch here andrew@rocketandcommerce.com or at ROCKET + COMMERCE

Humanocracy: Creating Organisations As Amazing As The People Inside Them

It is rare that you come across a business book that makes you scream “YEEEESSSS!” when you haven’t even read it yet. In fact, I don’t think that has ever happened to me before.

Just a few words in the blurb from author Gary Hamel did it for me:

“Our organisations are failing us. They’re sluggish, change-phobic, and emotionally arid. Human beings, by contrast, are adaptable, creative, and full of passion. This gap between individual and organisational capability is the unfortunate by-product of bureaucracy–the top-down, rule-choked management structure that undergirds virtually every organisation on the planet” – Gary Hamel, management guru and author of Humanocracy

This quote, COVID-19 and first-hand experience of these issues over the past 20 years provided the inspiration for me to want to better understand what is going on inside large and small organisations around the world across 15 dimensions including leadership, strategy, culture, processes, and technology.

This led to a multi-month project producing the REIGNITE! 2020 Report, numerous new tools and frameworks including the COVID Response Index (CRI) and REIGNITE! FLYWHEEL, a forthcoming ebook (wait list here), and new set of offerings at REIGNITE! Global.

I doubt Gary Hamel realises what he has started and the impact he is going to have with this book. Actually, he probably does.

Humaocracy is out soon and on pre-order now. Obviously, I have signed up. Book review to follow in September I think.

#covidresponse #covidimpact #leadership #strategicresponse #organisationalbehaviour #organisationalchange

First And Second Order COVID Impacts

Every day there is a new story or report on how COVID will impact X, whether business, industry sector, country, health, your brain, and so on. This has been going for months, and obviously will continue for a long time.

In fact yesterday I posted about this in relation to the island I live (Guernsey).

I’ve since started a very basic list of these impacts. I’ve divided up into first order (direct) and second order impacts (indirect). I haven’t done so but I will need to categorise them.

Over time I’ll aim to build up in a database and post updates here. In the meantime, please feel to comment or add your perspectives here or on the socials.

First Order Impacts

Reduction of in-bound and outbound business and leisure travel
Increasing shift to online business development and sales
Increased e-commerce and local delivery needs
Increased demand for flexible and remote working
Increased home office improvement needs
Shifting social and psychological contract for workers and consumers
Increasing focus on mental health, wellbeing, worker and customer safety, trust
Office rationalisation due to safety measures and demand for flexible working
Smarter, frictionless offices with more automation, smartphone ID, facial recognition and refit for more experiential work e.g. client meets, collaboration, workshops, creativity, training
Increased demand for more use cases beyond shopping for contactless payments and frictionless ordering e.g. restaurants, cafes
Commercial real estate, higher education and executive training, and hospitality models upended

Second Order Impacts

Trust, safety, culture differentiator for certain workplaces in areas
Potential migration away from over-populated major cities (e.g. UK) into second cities, regional or coastal areas
Universities unlikely to open meaning a significant number of ‘gap’ years for 18 year olds
Existing older leaders aim to cement positions and hold on to ‘power’ or a changing of the guard for new perspectives
Changing mix of workforce with more comfort for a ‘talent anywhere’ model
Requirement for more flexible resourcing with demand for more specialised contract and freelancers
New sectors developing hybrid on/offline business models for smarter, more relevant customer experiences e.g. education, gyms, training, retail
More public and private infrastructure development
Talent anywhere to hire the best wherever they are
Smarter, frictionless, reconfigured offices which may be provided as a perk
Smart phone use cases in-store increase e.g. digital ID, office access, ordering in-store
Privacy issues around any contact tracing services
Retail high-streets and commercial workplaces continue to transform with more residential housing

Google Home Working Until July 2021

After I saw the Google announcement in the NY Post I posted this comment on LinkedIn and Twitter earlier today:

“Big tech tend to be the test bed for new HR practices although many do not go mainstream. Even with the pandemic I still don’t think this will hit mass market either mainly due to powerful old school bureaucratic orgs, entrenched work practices, and many baby boomer leaders holding on for control”.

As a glass-half-full-guy I hope I am wrong here, but having worked in and consulted to many large and small organisations on almost all continents, I can’t see a majority of businesses following suit.

It will be fascinating to track what happens on this issue (and all other organisational behavioural) issues over time.

4 Key Takeaways From The US Big Tech ‘Monopoly’ Hearings

The House Judiciary Committee’s Democratic chairman, Rhode Island Rep. David Cicilline, concluded today’s daylong hearing by hinting at what might lie ahead as lawmakers ponder federal regulations to hold the four companies — worth nearly a combined $5 trillion — to account.

In summary, Rep. David Cicilline, D-R.I., says Amazon, Facebook, Google and Apple operate like monopolies and need to be broken up or regulated.

“These companies as they exist today have monopoly power. Some need to be broken up. All need to be properly regulated and held accountable,” said Cicilline, adding that antitrust laws written a century ago need to be updated for the digital age.

“When these laws were written, the monopolists were men named Rockefeller and Carnegie,” he said. “Today the men are named Zuckerberg, Cook, Pichai and Bezos. Once again, their control of the marketplace allows them to do whatever it takes to crush independent business and expand their own power. This must end.”

This power has been obvious for many years (and accelerated in 2020 due to COVID) however the political will has never been there until now, and agreeing the exact nature of the ‘stick’ or remedies to sort out the issues is never an easy task.

According to NPR, 4 key takeaways from today include the following:

Bezos “can’t guarantee” Amazon never used seller data to make its own products
Hurting the competition emerges as Democrats’ primary charge against Big Tech
Republicans sidetrack hearing to air complaints over anti-conservative bias
Missing from view? Zuckerberg’s reaction (when Bezos described social media as a “nuance destruction machine”)

NPR do a great job filling out the details and you can read the full article here

The REIGNITE! 2020 Report

“Many have compared the COVID crisis to armed conflict … Once this war against an invisible enemy is over, our ambitions should be bolder – nothing less than to make a fit planet for our grandchildren to live on” – Mark Carney, Former Governor, Bank of England

After a few months of research, analysis and writing during lockdown, I am pleased to be able to finally share insights from one of the largest single studies of strategic responses of Guernsey firms to the COVID-19 pandemic (“crisis”) conducted to date.

You can access the full report here, or below I have pasted in the key sections.

Background

Between April and June, I surveyed 439 senior leaders across Guernsey, UK, EU, US, APAC using a 15 question open-ended online survey (see below):

Why?

Given the nature and scale of the pandemic, this really is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for organisational behaviouralists to understand what is going on in terms of how firms, leaders, employees and other stakeholders are responding over time.

Specifically, for leaders and firm the findings hopefully help with the following:

New Insight: Leaders and teams can better understand the strategic responses of large and small firms across many different sectors to the crisis, and the complex consequences, behaviour, and implications it has had on firms, people and customers

Priorities: Leaders and teams can learn about the priority focus areas and big opportunities for leaders to better structure and get to work to rebuild and reignite performance

Behaviours: Leaders and teams can learn the new leadership styles, cultural behaviours, mindsets, and ways of working needed to turn crisis into opportunity

Key Findings:

We identified 6 areas of insight for leaders and firms:

Evolution AND Revolution

5-10 years of change in 5 weeks for many sectors
Rapid acceleration of many pre-existing structural trends (e.g. cloud, flexible work, e-commerce, up-skilling) and new behaviours likely to endure
For many change will likely be evolutionary but for others it will be revolutionary with increasing pace of change e.g. retail.
Leaders must continuously identify, evaluate and scenario plan for the right market signals, trends and new consumer behaviours
Firms who don’t do this, get it wrong or go too slow risk disruption, market share loss or other business risks

OPPORTUNITY: The top 5 key trends impacting your firm today will provide the investment roadmap for your next 24 months

2. Trust As A Differentiator

There are complex dynamics at play and business and moral imperatives for leaders to assess the impact of the crisis on the human psyche which has affected people in many different ways
The “psychological contract” between employer/employee has also shifted for many, and firms must now not assume ‘old’ practices were the right ones.
Traditional work assumptions have been challenged, as as well complex issues around safety, mental health, inclusivity, belonging, empathy, EQ, culture, power dynamics, and expectations on leadership styles

OPPORTUNITY: The firms who get these complex dynamics right will become the new employers/brands of choice 2021+

3. Digital Acceleration

The crisis has shown that rapid change at speed and scale is possible using digital and cloud in the short-term.
Rapidly advancing and converging technologies combined with increasing human capabilities, new business models and ways to organise and lead are needed.
Digital laggards and firms with limited customer-centricity will get left behind due to external forces and competitive intensity

OPPORTUNITY: Put digital at the centre of your corporate strategy, align leaders on digital acumen so every CXO is a Chief Digital Officer for their function, upskill workers, and prioritise the top3 digitising opportunities beyond back-office operations into more advanced worker productivity tools (e.g. automation, AI, analytics), superior customer experiences, new products/services and ecosystem collaborations/ventures

4. New Skills, Mindsets and Ways of Working

As a shift to ‘smarter working’ means different thing to different firms, it is important to define what it is, what it means for the firms and employees, and what are the expected behaviours, required, skills, mindsets, and ways of working.
Continued experimentation is required to engage with workforce, test models, gain feedback, learn best practices, and repeat, but the risk is many firms will likely revert to old habits and practices which will jeopardise trust with their talent
This process is critical as learnings will likely have firm-wide impacts to entire workforce and processes, practices, culture and strategies e.g. training, performance management, corporate values, recruitment, rewards, policies, agile methods

OPPORTUNITY: Whilst firms who prioritise and commit to this will adjust more quickly to the landscape, those who use intentional cultural design as the agent of change will build a stronger platform than peers for longer-term success

5. Resilience And Adaptability

Whilst many firms are making cuts to ride out the storm or shutting down permanently, our research identified many entrepreneurial firms who adapted quickly with new business models AND in parallel also focused on financial restructuring (e.g. loans, capital raising) and enhancing productivity (e.g. software, up-skilling), better utilisation (e.g. re-deploying staff), or improving customer experiences (e.g. online ordering via Facebook Commerce).

OPPORTUNITY: The firms who get the right but very difficult balance of resilient best practices, innovation for growth with longer-term exploration, and agile/new ways of working will be well-positioned to outperform peers and last for the longer-term

6. Increasing Leadership Complexity

Given the nature of the crisis, for many leaders it represented a call to action to adopt both crisis management AND people-focused behaviours such as empathy, self-awareness, openness, vulnerability, and EQ
The best leaders will also now spend more time on longer-term growth and innovation planning and exploration

OPPORTUNITY: Self-awareness is critical for leaders to start addressing skills gaps. Those who do and forge more trusting, purposeful, inclusive, authentic, and empathetic workplaces will retain (and be able to hire) the best talent and rebound faster then competitors

Survey Results

The survey results showed that the crisis has impacted organisations in many different ways over time. Some have had headwinds and tailwinds, but many have been caught in the middle.

The challenge now will be for leaders to be ‘open’ to understanding ‘what is going on’ inside and outside the firm, evaluating the degree to which each is relevant and to what extent, and then planning and executing an appropriate response.

Confidence

Whereas 92% of international respondents were confident of being able to get through the crisis, only 64% of Guernsey respondents felt confident

Speed

96% of respondents indicated that their firms were able to respond to the crisis fast (52%) or extremely fast (44%);

Impact

22% of firms were unable to operate due to the crisis

Change

Smarter working (34%), new technologies (33%) and new offerings (22%) were pre- planned changes that were accelerated due to the crisis

Work

47% of respondents saw no changes to their work (i.e. work remotely) with the remaining undergoing disruption including job losses (15%). Adapting to virtual meetings (26%) and new ways of working (27%) were the major changes to jobs/skills

People

Employee safety and well-being (31%) were the major areas of people focus

Leadership

Empathetic leadership (25%) with strong communications (23%) were the major leadership behaviours demonstrated

Technology

Desktop and mobile video-conferencing (VC) tools (46%) and cloud-based document and collaboration software (28%) were the most valuable technologies

Culture

Supportiveness (30%) and team spirit (20%) were the most valuable cultural attributes

Processes

New ways of working (18%) and new technologies (18%) have been the most important processes to improve

Innovation + Growth

Interestingly, only a small number of firms innovated with new channels or offerings (7%), with 12% engaging more with clients/partners (12%), and 14% indicating ‘no innovation’

What survey respondents said about the impact of the crisis on:

IMPACT:

“Categorisation of business critical role and function for immediate, should and medium term. Anything out of above scope, amended, reduced or halted. Focus is on surviving the immediate challenge and preparation for reopening” – Hotel Owner

SMARTER WORKING:

“The crisis has enabled more working from home flexibility, more focus on work life balance in times like this where stress and anxiety are a big part of many employees’ lives” – Director, Training Firm

CHANGES:

“More areas of focus needed include managing mental health and wellness during and after the crisis; planning for the ‘new normal’, whatever that may be, and likely to be different in many ways to how we worked before COVID; and reintegration – thinking carefully about how we transition back to face to face after a sustained period of disruption, easily underestimated and ignored as a potential challenge”– Management consultant

LEADERSHIP:

“Empathy, transparency, and authenticity. For example, our MD did a WebEx from his daughter’s bedroom for all to see” – Sales Director

CULTURE:

“Agility, flexibility, ability to make quick decisions” – CTO

TECHNOLOGY:

“The crisis has sped up the utilisation of tools such as Microsoft Teams for meetings, e-signature software and other tech which will assist both with internal and external customers moving forward” – Investment Banker

GROWTH + INNOVATION:

We have built industry specific thought leadership and points of view that have historically fallen down the list behind client work; digitising our many face to face interventions, essentially helping us build out a whole new suite of assets that are now deployable in a virtual environment now and beyond COVID; more time for training and personal development – Learning and Development Manager

Conclusion

In summary, the crisis presents a significant opportunity for all leaders and firms to reset and lean-in to fully understanding what is going on in terms of how the crisis is impacting organisations in the short-term, what this might tell us about longer-term impacts, and where and how to focus efforts and investments across the operating model.

The Post-Crisis World of Work With Adam Grant

As people and businesses plan for pandemic recover and rebuilding, experts such as organisational psychologist Professor Adam Grant of Wharton are a great source of inspiration.

He gave a recent interview with Ross Chainey at European Business Magazine which provided a tonne of insight into the future of work in light of the ongoing crisis.

It was so good that I had to provide an edited transcript of the conversation below. Enjoy

First and foremost, this is a global health and economic crisis. But, for many millions of us, we’re battling a loss of normalcy in our daily lives. How well-prepared do you think we are to deal with a situation like this? Does it play to any of our natural strengths or is it more likely to expose our weaknesses?

It’s a little bit of both, like everything else. The challenging part is, as human beings, we don’t like uncertainty and unpredictability. There’s even some evidence that if you’re highly neurotic, you actually prefer experiencing pain over being in the dark about what you’re going to experience. That’s a part of the crisis that’s really a challenge.

On the flip side, we’re highly adaptable. Darwin wrote when he was building his theory of evolution that natural selection favours a sense of flexibility. It’s not always the strongest species that survives; it’s sometimes the most adaptable.

I think one of the ways we can cope with the uncertainty is: when you can’t imagine the future, you can actually rewind and think more about the past. You can recognize hardships that you’ve faced before. You can learn something from the lessons of your own resilience and then try to figure out “what did I do effectively before that might work for me today?”

I still hear a lot of people complaining about FOMO – the fear of missing out – even though there’s nothing really going on. Has COVID killed FOMO or exacerbated it?

I prefer to think about this less in terms of FOMO and more in terms of what’s often called JOMO, which is the joy of missing out. I actually made a list of all the things I’m thrilled that I don’t have to do, and that includes changing out of sweatpants [and] having to commute.

This is a practice that’s pretty useful for people. We have a lot of evidence that marking moments of joy can actually create those moments of joy because we’re more likely to notice them. We’re more likely to savour and share them. Being able to capture a few things that are really joyful about getting to stay home seems like a productive step.

We’re all separated from our teams. How can we maintain a sense of belonging while isolated at home?

I don’t know that it’s easy. In one company, they did a virtual tour of their home offices. That gave them the chance to talk about some of the mementos that they keep nearby. They were showing off pictures that their kids drew for them. And it was a great moment of personal connection in a way that never would have happened if everyone was in the office.

I’m not suggesting that’s the perfect fit for everyone, but it seemed like a small step that can make a meaningful difference in feeling like I learned something new about my colleagues, [that] I see them more as human beings as opposed to just achievement robots.

Every team has its introverts and extroverts. Do you think this crisis has levelled the playing field between them?

I wouldn’t go that far. I think the reality of the current situation is we’re still catering to extroversion. We’re now sitting on video calls all day, as opposed to saying: “You know what, maybe we should have fewer meetings”.

We’ve known for a while that that introverts’ voices tend to get overlooked in a group setting. This would be a good time to experiment with moving towards some more independent individual work, which we know is the best approach if you want to generate lots of good ideas in groups.

One of the simple practices I would recommend to make sure that introverts don’t get drowned out is to shift from brainstorming to brain-writing. So brain-writing is a process where you [ask] all the people in a team to come up with ideas independently, then submit them. Then you review them. That leverages individual strengths around coming up with original ideas and allows the group to do what it does best, which is to begin to evaluate and refine. That’s probably one of the most effective ways to make sure that introverts are heard.

Through this crisis, managing expectations has become even harder. All of a sudden, we’re workers, we’re teachers, we’re providers, we’re cleaners. Should we try and keep up? Is this good for our sanity?

This is a time when leaders need to be flexible and compassionate. This is not an experiment that any of us opted into, but as long as we’re stuck with it, as a leader, it’s an opportunity to say: “If I impose less control over people’s schedules and plans, that’s going to teach me whether I can trust them or not”.

We’ve known from a couple of decades of research on management and monitoring that when people are monitored too closely, that signals distrust and they respond by saying, “I don’t really feel obligated to act in a way that you might consider trustworthy”. Whereas when you allow [people] to make some choices, they start to feel a greater sense of loyalty and they reciprocate the trust that they’re shown. Given that we don’t have a lot of options anyway to control people, this is the ideal time to do a little bit less of it.

Is this a particularly challenging time for managers, and what advice would you have for them?

I think this is a great time for leaders to be more hands-off when it comes to scheduling and planning. Where leaders may need to be a little bit more hands-on is in figuring out how their people are doing on a day-to-day basis. This is one place where leaders have an opportunity to learn.

Imagine if you’re a manager, how awkward it would be in year two to sit down and say: “I’d love to find out what you’re finding interesting in this job; what aspects of your work you find meaningful; and are there changes we can make that would make your job a little bit more exciting?”

This is a moment when leaders can take a step back and say: “I haven’t always learned as much about my employees’ values, interests, strengths, motivations as I should have, and what better time than now”.

How does work/life balance work in a crisis like this?

Work/life balance has been a myth for a long time. If you care about your family, and you care about your job, and you also want to prioritize health and friendships and hobbies, the idea that you might have even a day where all those things are in perfect harmony to me is hysterically funny, if not just wrong.

What I always strive for is balance in a week, where I might have two days where I’m pretty focused on my work and I don’t get as much time with my family as I want, but then I’ll have two more days where I’m in family mode and work takes a backseat. That’s probably the most realistic way to manage this crisis – to say [that] instead of work/life balance, we ought to think about work/life rhythm.

You’ve written a lot about givers, takers and matchers. Does this period of self-isolation when working remotely magnify or reduce these qualities?

Giving, taking and matching are just different styles of interaction that we bring to the workplace. Givers are people who by default want to know, “what can I do for you?” Takers are the opposite. They’re interested in figuring out “what can you do for me?” And then matchers hover in the middle of that spectrum and say, “I don’t want to be too selfish or too generous, and so I’ll do something for you if you do something for me”.

The takers may feel like they have a little bit more licence to shirk, maybe to steal credit for other people’s ideas. I think though, we’ve seen an incredible outpouring of generosity in this crisis. The givers really see this as a situation where they need to step up. They feel a sense of responsibility to try to help. My guess is that matching gets weeded out a little bit. I don’t think that most people operate like matchers because it’s their core value. I think people match because they’re afraid of the risks of over-correcting on either side. In these situations, people probably gravitate more toward fundamentally, am I more of a selfish or generous person?

One of the big frustrations for givers in a situation like this is they don’t always know where they can help. A couple of years ago, I cofounded a knowledge-sharing platform called Givitas, to make it easy for people to seek and give help in five minutes a day or less. I would love to see more of those kinds of efforts to make sure that we can make people’s needs and requests visible, so that the people who have the motivation and the ability to contribute are able to direct their energy in the way it’s needed.

You said recently that interruptions are part of our new reality. Many people are struggling with distractions and procrastination. Are there ways to make ourselves more resilient to this?

I don’t know that that resilience is possible when it comes to interruptions, because the problem is less that they’re a source of hardship; it’s more that they’re distracting and it’s hard to get back into the task. Probably one of the best things we can do is try to find a sense of self-compassion.

Psychologists like Kristin Neff say, “think of the kindness that you would show to a friend who was in a situation like yours. What happens if you apply that same kindness to yourself?” When we get interrupted, instead of getting frustrated, I can say, “okay, this is a really difficult time right now”.

Interruptions are part of the human condition. They are an intensified part of the human condition during a pandemic. I know I’m not the only one facing these. Let me just see if I can get through today without losing control. If I don’t succeed today, I’ll try again tomorrow. When we don’t beat ourselves up like that, it’s a lot easier to move forward as opposed to wallowing in the challenges we’ve faced in the past.

Is there anything positive that may come out of this crisis?

We’re going to see a lot of employers embrace more flexibility around working from home and having virtual teams. They’re going to find out that it wasn’t as impossible as they thought it was, and there are some productivity gains that come from not having to commute, and getting to work where you want.

On an individual level, unfortunately, there are some people who are going to face post-traumatic stress. The encouraging news psychologically is over half of people report a different response to trauma, which is post-traumatic growth. Post-traumatic growth is the sense that, I wish this didn’t happen but, given that it happened, I feel like I am better in some way. It might be a heightened sense of personal strength; it could be a deeper sense of gratitude; it could be finding new meaning, or investing more in relationships.

Being so eager to get back to normal, having gone through this long crisis, how do we make sure that we learn from this experience?

Learning from an experience like this comes from reflection. As people come out of this crisis and start coming back to work, the first thing that I would do is have a discussion about what everyone learned from the experiments they ran. Some of those experiments were by force, others were by choice, but we’ve all had to test out different routines and the way we work.

I’d want to hear what everyone tested out, what worked and what didn’t, and then keep evolving what we thought were our best practices in light of that. That would be something that you continue doing. Last I checked, experiments are the best way to learn.

Presumably there’ll be some powerful insights for you to learn from this whole experience?

There are going to be some incredible natural experiments that are already being run. They’re going to be analyzed, and we’re going to be able to see what’s the effect of having to work from home on productivity at a scale that’s never been tested before. We’re also going to learn something about what happens to people’s creativity and connection when they can’t interact face-to-face with their colleagues.

There’s a whole group of organizational psychologists, as well as sociologists and management professors, who are going to spend the next five, 10 years studying the effects of this pandemic in different places. In a way, another form of post-traumatic growth is we gain new insights about how to work together effectively from a distance that we wouldn’t have had access to otherwise. And I wish we didn’t have access to it. I’d rather not go through this crisis. But given that we’re stuck with it, we might as well try to learn from it.

Facebook Commerce

Facebook have finally followed in the footsteps on their Asian competitors (e.g. WeChat) and just announced their big play to grab a slice of the accelerating global e-commerce market yesterday. And critically, provide some level of competition to the Gorilla out there (i.e. Amazon).

Shops started rolling out on Facebook yesterday in the United States and they are set to come to Instagram this summer. With this launch coming during COVID-19, it means commerce and community can finally play nicely together and enable SMEs to better respond to any e-commerce opportunities presented by the pandemic. For many, the online and mobile channel is the only hope for survival.

According to a survey conducted by Facebook and the Small Business Roundtable, a third of SMEs have stopped operating and an additional 11 percent say they could fail within the next three months if the current situation continues.

Here are the highlights (according to Facebook directly):

In a live stream, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said expanded e-commerce would be important to begin rebuilding the economy while the pandemic continues. “If you can’t physically open your store or restaurant, you can still take orders online and ship them to people,” he said. “We’re seeing a lot of small businesses that never had online businesses get online for the first time.”
Businesses can now turn Facebook and Instagram pages into online shops. They also joined forces with Shopify, who recently released their Shop app, to allow merchants to leverage their shipping, inventory and fulfillment features. The aim is to help new shop owners and small businesses to leverage their existing audiences to compete with Amazon.
Shops can be found on businesses’ Facebook pages and Instagram profiles, and they can also appear in stories or be promoted in ads. Items that businesses have made available for purchase will appear within the shop, and users can either save items or place an order. (Some businesses enable users to make purchases directly on Facebook, while others will take you to the business’s website to complete the transaction.)
According to Facebook, Shops will improve on the standard web commerce experience by storing users’ payment credentials in a single place that they can then use on any Facebook or Instagram storefront.
Businesses can handle customer support issues through Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Eventually, the company plans to let you browse store catalogs and make purchases directly from the chat window. It also plans to enable shopping from live streams, allowing brands and creators to tag items from their Facebook catalogs so that they appear on the bottom of live videos.
The e-commerce ecosystem around this will hot up to help store owners. For example:
- Elliot creates simple product landing pages with one-tap checkout
- Storr is for mobile commerce, so you can set up a store from your phone

A few initial thoughts include the following:

While Shops are free to create, they could create significant new business opportunities for Facebook in advertising, payments, and other services. Businesses will be able to buy ads for their Shops, and when people use Facebook’s checkout option, it charges them a fee.
This shopping rollout will no doubt have big algorithm implications on Instagram and Facebook. Early reports are showing how a “shopping” tab might interact with the “activity” tab on Instagram to increase the focus on commerce for businesses and their followers. Soon I suspect you’ll see Shops appear in stories and promoted ads.
Facebook Shops will eventually be integrated with WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram DMs, so you can browse store catalogs and make purchases through chats. The influencer marketing industry is set to benefit too as live streaming and shopping will be pairing up.

Facebook has been dabbling in commerce for years. In 2016, it introduced Marketplace, a destination within the app for peer-to-peer buying and selling. Two years later, Instagram began working on a standalone shopping app, though it was later abandoned. Instead, last year, Instagram added in-app checkout.

Given the devastation caused to many traditional physical retailers by COVID-19, hopefully this announcement makes it easier for SMEs to reach existing or new markets (or better serve existing customers).

With billion+ global userbase of the Facebook ecosystem and ongoing pandemic, you would think it will be a slam dunk. That said, I don’t think Jeff Bezos will be having any sleepless nights. But it will be interesting to see how it goes in these E-Commerce Wars.

Rethinking Education and Learning

“Direct to learner” (DTL) business models and start-ups that leverage online, mobile, AI and other technologies have been an area of much focus within the ‘Edtech’ sector for over a decade.

The late Professor Clayton Christensen had made the topic one of his core areas of focus in the last decade of his life with books including Disrupting Class and The Innovator’s University.

Companies like Coursera, Udemy, Duolingo, Quizlet, Skillshare, Codecademy, Outschool and Lambda are just a few examples.

Just this sample reaches hundreds of millions of learners all around the world each month. Many learners use these products for free. A small percentage of learners pay. And yet this portfolio will generate close to a half a billion dollars of revenue in 2020.

Another interesting thing about this portfolio is that none of these companies have spent a lot of capital building their businesses. They have all been very capital efficient and most are cash flow positive at this point.

So, what?

Direct to learner businesses are obviously very attractive for consumers and investors
They can serve a very large number of learners very efficiently
They can lightly monetize and yet produce massive revenues because of their scale
They don’t require a huge amount of capital to build

As they are competing with a sector which broadly, looks exactly the same as it did 100 years ago (schools, universities, training), the current pandemic will massively accelerate significant structural changes in the way people and companies learn, train and educate.

The University segment in particular is in for a massive shock. I can’t see as much change happening in junior schooling (e.g. ages 3-7) mainly as the main job that these bodies do is child-care. I’m currently parenting a 3 and 4 year old and this is the main reason why I’m sweating on schools (safely) re-opening soon.

I’ll share further thoughts on these topics in later posts.

Turbocharging Legal Industry Transformation

“COVID-19 will produce a thinning of the herd and a reimagined legal industry” – Mark Cohen

Last Thursday I watched a great online webinar run by LegalGeek entitled ‘An Uncertain Decade’. Legal sector experts Mark Cohen and Richard Susskind ran the sessions. Whilst I have read various thought leadership from each expert, it was the first time I had seen either speak. Not surprisingly, they both were very impressive in both domain expertise and thoughtfulness around their points of view.

Here are some key takeaways (along with my thoughts):

Disruption: COVID-19 will dramatically turbocharge legal industry transformation which has been slowly accelerating since the 2008 Financial Crisis. This may not be that surprising to many outsiders, however many lawyers – including those in Generation X – still tend to be conservative when thinking about competition, new technologies, business models, and structural market changes. Transformation and disruptive models and services will continue to come from outside traditional law firms. Whilst Disruptive Innovation theories of Professor Clayton Christensen were not referenced, his work on how established firms often are disrupted by low-end entrants who move up-market over time, will provide insight as to why and how this is happening within the legal sector (click here for his articles from Harvard Business Review).
Innovation: Enterprise clients and consumers will continue to drive the shift away from bundled services toward a more productised, customer-centric mode of consumption at scale which leverage new technologies, business models, and regulatory changes. This has already been happening to some extent ‘around the edges’, and facilitated by ABS models in the UK (whereby retailers (e.g. Co-Op), real estate agents, insurers and other firms can compete head-on with traditional legal practices with their own legal services ventures). DoNotPay in the US was cited as a recent example of a start-up which has over 100 use cases of dispute resolution services (e.g. fight a parking ticket). A new and current use case in the US for them has been to make it easy, cheap and convenient to file unemployment and other worker claims.
Unbundling: The impending depression driven by COVID-19 and resultant cost pressures for clients will accelerate the shifting of lower value, high-volume work to more flexible, alternative providers (e.g. LPOs, ABS Licensed Firms, Big4, Axiom, UnitedLex etc) and digital platforms (e.g. DoNotPay). This will continue to enable these players to move further up-scale into higher-value, more complex work and jobs. This is how the Indian IT outsourcing firms managed to make significant in-roads against Accenture, IBM and others in the 2000s, and how Toyota managed to become a US car manufacturing leader with its low-cost model US market strategy. Over the coming years, the legal industry will continue to rapidly fragment beyond traditional structural boundaries to incorporate a much bigger share for alternative providers (which will grow rapidly at the expense of incumbents), but significant new markets will be created especially for those consumers (i.e. non-consumers) who historically have never able to access low-cost, convenient legal services;
Business Models: A next generation of technology-enabled service providers (e.g. FisherBroyles) will gain rapid scale over the next decade in the same way as FinTechs have within Retail Banking. Continued experimentation by established law firms (e.g. non-legal services diversification, in-sourcing IT, new product development etc) and further consolidation within and amongst traditional law firms and alternative services providers, vendors and legaltechs unable to re-capitalise or scale. Large traditional law firms with the foresight and capital to invest over the coming years will likely continue to struggle to properly allocate resources and organise these innovative models efficiently and effectively within the established firm.
Online Dispute Resolution: COVID-19 has provided an MVP to as legal systems and courts globally have had to re-think how to deliver this. According to Mark Cohen:

The inaccessibility, cost, formality, abstruse rules, and protracted processes of courts in their present guise is misaligned with life in the digital age. The urgency of modernization is unprecedented. Courts around the world have ground to a halt when demand for accessible, efficient, and widespread administration of justice is desperately needed.

Education: Law Schools have not really changed their content, formats or approach to skills in over 40 years. Combined with EdTech disruption, providers will be under significant pressure to change in line with industry and client demands. Traditional JD/LLB’s offered by mid-market schools in the short-term will see massive disruption and closures, whilst the degree as it stand may become a more commoditised requirement, augmented by other specialty courses run by others or industry. Clearly, now is the time for online law ‘degree’ or course models, assuming the solicitor/lawyer regulatory boards provide approval (if they haven’t already)
Training: Traditional insistence of a junior being trained up or supervised by a senior lawyer/partner will be turned on its head. Assuming a longer-term shift to more remote working for a large number of the workforce and demand for more multi-skilled lawyers (e.g. project management), training for juniors (and all staff) will need to be redesigned.

In a recent Forbes article here, Mark Cohen concludes the following:

The old guard will cling to the hope these are temporary changes. They will point to the recession precipitated by the 2008 global economic crisis and suggest the current one will take a similar course. This time is different. Technology and new delivery models are far more advanced than they were in 2008. Consumers have a different mindset and a greater urgency to solve a growing list of complex challenges. The potential of technology and its ability to support new models, processes, and paradigms is already on display. The genie is out of law’s bottle, and it will not return.

Opportunities for Law (and other) Firms

Interestingly, there wasn’t too much discussion on this during the webinar. For me, Disruptive Innovation theory might provide some guidance for any progressive law firms who wish to take on the inevitable structural and business model disruptions described above. I’ll save this analysis for another post soon.

Part 1 – Current and future use cases of AI in legal and compliance services

2. Key issues for the future of AI-power legal and compliance services

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How have you shaped the lectures?

Do you have a formula, a definition, for what artificial intelligence is?

But could a dishwasher not fit into that definition?

And is it fair to say there have been great advances in the past decade in particular?

So what is the destination for AI?

And where are we in terms of that journey?

You’ve painted a picture showing AI has made quite a lot of progress – but not as much as it thinks. Are we at a point, though, of extreme danger?

Your second lecture is about military use of AI and the dangers there. Why does that deserve a whole lecture?

What are you hoping for in terms of the reaction to these lectures – that people will come away scared, inspired, determined to see a path forward with this technology?

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On digital:

On resilience:

On business strategies:

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#1 Increased digital adoption enables adaptability at speed and scale

#2 Digital acceleration increases the widening gap between the ‘laggards’ and transforming leaders

#3 Digital acceleration enables more advanced and integrated human and digital combinations

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First Order Impacts

Second Order Impacts

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Background

Why?

Key Findings:

Evolution AND Revolution

2. Trust As A Differentiator

3. Digital Acceleration

4. New Skills, Mindsets and Ways of Working

5. Resilience And Adaptability

6. Increasing Leadership Complexity

Survey Results

What survey respondents said about the impact of the crisis on:

Conclusion

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