Don’t go BACK to business as usual, build FORWARD better

I always hang on Colin Shaw's words, and this article is a great rallying call for all businesses as we move "post-pandemic" into some sort of "normality". He heralds "the next wave of business change... Customer Science is the fusion of artificial intelligence (AI), customer data, and the concept of the behavioural sciences".

I'm reminded of the neat summary by Tom Peters, in his brilliant book 'Excellence Now: Extreme Humanism', of the concept of "AI/Artificial Intelligence (scrap the humans) vs. IA/Intelligence Augmented (enhanced human performance)." The bottom line (in my view) is that the future success of businesses will require a greater, not lesser, focus on what it is to be human, and what humans want.

AI alone cannot do this - if you doubt me, just ask yourself how much of your Facebook feed consists of the content you actually want to see!

I recently watched 'Sully: Miracle on the Hudson', the 2016 drama film based on the 2009 autobiography by Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger and Jeffrey Zaslow. Tom Hanks stars as Sullenberger, and the film follows his January 2009 emergency landing of US Airways Flight 1549 on the Hudson River, in which all 155 passengers and crew survived - most suffering only minor injuries - and the subsequent publicity and investigation.

It's a great story, well told, and what struck me most forcibly was the depiction of the National Transportation Safety Board's use of computerised simulations, demonstrating its view that Sullenberger could and should have flown back to the nearest airport. Eventually, it transpires that the pilots involved in the simulation have practised 17 times: when their thinking and preparation time is reduced in line with reality, the simulations end in disaster. As one of the investigators concludes: "I can say with confidence, that after... running all the scenarios and talking to each of the players... there is an X in this result. It's you, Captain Sullenberger. Take you out of the equation and the math just fails."

The next wave of business change is Customer Science. Customer Science is the fusion of artificial intelligence (AI), customer data, and the concept of the behavioral sciences. However, if you miss this next new wave of change, you could be in danger of repeating the same mistakes you did last year and the year before that. (Colin Shaw, 20th January 2022)