New World Same Humans #28
Some of our most consequential industries are coming apart at the seams. It's a Great Unbundling, and at its heart lies a powerful human imperative: the need to learn.
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Under lockdown, life is atomized.
You used to sit in the office, sipping a coffee, working on your laptop and chatting to a colleague – all at once. Now you sit at your kitchen table and work alone. Later, you Zoom a colleague for 30 minutes. You make your own coffee. Back to the laptop.
For months now ordinary experiences have been broken down into their constituent parts and then served back to us. It’s been a novel, strange kind of defamiliarization. But it also has deep consequences for the way our societies work, and for what lies ahead.
This week, I want to look at those consequences. In particular at the common theme that runs through many of them: our desire, and need, to learn.
The school of life
The economic consequences of the pandemic are in their infancy, but it’s clear some high-profile industries are being ripped apart. Crucially, those industries are not coming apart in a random way. They’re coming apart at the seams.
That phenomenon is driving the observation, currently ubiquitous, that most industries are bundles: collections of services stuck together and delivered in one package. Look for bundles and you start to see them everywhere. More specifically, what you see in in 2020 are some of the most consequential bundles in our society being unbundled.
The influential business thinker and New York University marketing professor Scott Galloway has written extensively on how higher education is being unbundled. Workplace offices are bundles of services; they are coming apart. The former VC and technology thinker Li Jin says employment itself is a bundle that is also now coming apart. And my NEXT Conference colleague Martin Recke has written on how business events are being unbundled.
The bundling and unbundling of services has always been central to how entrepreneurs fight to create new value propositions. But right now we’re watching something highly unusual: an orgy of unbundling across multiple industries, all at once. And one important feature of all this is becoming visible. Amid this transformation, the fundamental human impulse to learn is the common denominator.
Just take a look at the industries I mentioned above.
Higher education is a bundle incorporating a huge array of services. The learning part is shifting online; here in the UK, Cambridge University says all lectures will be online only until at least summer 2021. Many US universities are going down the same route. But what will prospective students make of this new value proposition; hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of student debt for Zoom classes? And let’s be honest, for many students it was the other parts of the bundle – halls of residence, sports teams, nightlife – that they really cared about. What happens to universities if that bundle can’t be pulled back together? No one is quite sure.
The main point of employment, of course, is economic return for your labour. But it’s also a bundle that incorporates much else: space and resources, a canteen and coffee machine, and, crucially, education, mentorship, and informal learning from the colleagues that surround you. Again, that bundle is coming apart, and the consequences for learning are deep. When millions work alone at a kitchen table or in a spare bedroom, opportunities for mentorship and informal learning vanish.
Business events, too, were becoming increasingly exotic bundles; think massive events such as The Next Web or Web Summit. Talks! Networking! Drinks, live music, and a trip to a medieval castle! Inside lockdown a billion virtual events have bloomed. But no one has solved for networking and informal knowledge exchange at Zoom events. So how do we recapture that benefit?
The new school
It seems to me that the Great Unbundling of 2020 is a revolution for learning and education above all else.
Take the long view and that shouldn’t be a surprise. We live at a time when the storehouse of human knowledge is deeper and more complex than ever. That has turned learning and education into increasingly pressing imperatives. But while our need has transformed, the supply has not evolved accordingly.
These days, new knowledge domains appear and deepen all the time; new jobs and entirely new industries arrive, flourish and the flame out at great speed. So the 20th-century model for how education fits into our life plans – learn up to the age of 18, say, or 21 if you go to college – no longer makes sense. In the 21st-century we all need to be lifelong learners.
That imperative has been sharpened by the pandemic. Many have lost their jobs, and those jobs are not coming back. Entire industries are not coming back. Or, when they do, many roles will have been automated away. In the decades ahead work will shift inexorably towards creativity, care, and human connection. Millions are going to need to learn new skills, and find new ways to serve something of value to others.
In short: education needed a revolution. Now, via the Great Unbundling, it’s going to get one.
Time to build
Looking for the next trillion-dollar industry to disrupt? Try this question: what is a university? How do we reimagine the learning experience for an age of online masterclasses, MOOCs, and superstar lecturers on YouTube? How can we develop new experiences that are innovative and offer respected credentials? How do we widen access, and create prestigious institutions that are not – as Ivy League colleges in the US and top universities in Europe are again becoming – finishing schools for the rich?
Way back in the 1960s one of my great heroes, the restless social innovator Michael Young, answered those questions for his own time. Realising that British higher education shut out working class people, he devised the Open University: a distance learning institution that leveraged the great technology of the age – television! – to open up undergraduate education to millions who’d previously been denied it. During my childhood post-midnight Open University lectures, broadcast on the BBC and hosted by famously nerdish academics, were a staple part of British culture. Today, the OU continues to thrive, and has educated over 2 million people.
Where are the new Michael Youngs, and what will they create in the years to come? They should attend not only to the disruption of higher education, but other forms of education and learning, too.
Think back to the office and employment bundles, which included learning that ranges from formal programmes, through mentorship, down to the kind of informal learning and knowledge absorption that just happens when you’re surrounded by colleagues.
As offices and employment gets unbundled there are huge opportunities to reimagine these benefits. Formal training programmes can often be replicated online; it’s the more informal, social learning that offers some of the most intriguing open space. If I’m a 25-year-old marketing professional in London, then why in 2020 can’t I hit a button somewhere online and instantly see the other marketing professionals in my local neighbourhood who are open to grabbing coffee today? Why can’t I find the 50-year-old marketing supremo who lives two streets across, who’d be happy to have lunch and share some advice? Wait, my client wants me to use a design platform that I don’t know? Why can’t I get instant livestream access to the peer – maybe in London, maybe in Mumbai – who can teach it to me?
At TrendWatching, my colleagues and I talked about an emerging trend we called M2P: mentor-to-peer. We asked: where is the Tinder for knowledge, skills and mentorship? It seems to me that the mentorship economy is still a great space for innovators to play in.
As for business events: sure, conference talks transfer online pretty well. But what about the informal learning and serendipitous knowledge exchange that happened in between the talks, during networking, or drinks? That was half the point of business events. New business-focused social platforms such as Clubhouse are trying to bottle some of that magic. But there’s still much to do.
The currency of the age
We live in an age of complex information, specialist knowledge domains, and rapid technological change. In that environment, knowledge and skills are an ever-more important currency. No wonder, then, that in the Great Unbundling of 2020 learning has emerged as the most powerful common theme.
It’s a trend that will do much to shape the decades ahead. And if you’re on a mission to build something impactful, it’s more than just nice to know. It’s an opportunity for action. There are founders, innovators and product people reading this who could spend the next ten years working on these questions. It’s a chance to build something huge, and do real good in the world.
But even if you don’t dream of reimagining the university for the 21st-century, remember: you and your organisation are in possession of knowledge and skills that others would like to have, and that you can transfer. How can you build new tools, platforms and communities that empower others to learn and develop?
The human impulse towards new knowledge, skills and capabilities is deep, and as old as human nature. The need to constantly learn from one another is only set to grow.
And full disclosure: when it comes to this trend, New World Same Humans won’t sit on the sidelines. Skip to the final section to learn more about how we can go forward, together!
Bright lights, big city?
This week, educate your grateful family and friends with these four quick snippets.
🤖 Last week I asked if sophisticated neural networks such as the new GPT-3 could ever legitimately be considered minds (TL;DR – maybe, but it’s complicated). This week, someone asked GPT-3 to write its own essay about AI and consciousness. The results are pretty wild. Plus, GPT-3’s concluding paragraph is not a million miles away from the one I wrote. I feel disrupted.
🏙️ A new report from MIT says superstar US cities such as New York, San Francisco and Chicago are no longer elevators of opportunity. Apart from those who start out inside a small, privileged circle, cities just aren’t helping the life chances of young people the way they used to. Back in NWSH #12 I asked if we’re coming to the end of our Great Age of the City.
💪 Matthew Taylor, the CEO of the UK’s Royal Society of Arts, calls for a new era of social innovation in his annual RSA lecture. Taylor says the pandemic has opened up space for a new Reflexive Age, in which we reimagine our economies around our true needs as organic, social and political beings.
👾 People are having business meetings inside video games, including Animal Crossing: New Horizons. It’s another sign of the emergence of the virtual experience economy, which we talked about in NWSH #15.
Forward, together
Thanks for reading this week.
Together, we’re forging a community for all those on a mission to build a better shared future. That means innovators, technologists, founders, strategists, product people, designers, marketers, policy makers, and more. It means you.
Learning and education will need to play a massive role in the new, improved New World Same Humans that is coming. I’m thinking hard about what that looks like, and pondering NWSH courses on foresight methodologies, better decision making, and more. There are two things you can do to help.
First, write and tell me what you want to learn from New World Same Humans. I’m also keen to hear what kinds of learning formats would work for you: text, podcast, hangout, something else? The more data I gather, the better this community can serve you. And I promise to write back!
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The more interesting people join us on our journey, the better for us all.
That’s enough from me for this week. Until next Sunday, be well,
David.
P.S: kudos to the brilliant Monique van Dusseldorp for the tip off about virtual business meetings!
Very good and with excellent insight for innovations contributed to "creative destruction", thought in the first half of the 20th century by economist Alois Schumpeter.